Poems for our times and for the future from three striking new voices.

AUP New Poets 12 brings together three careful observers of the everyday and the ineffable. Anuja Mitra, Loretta Riach and Zephyr Zhang tell of wandering through cities, ghostworking from office cubicles and sweating through heat waves and tax season; of grappling with questions of alienation, belonging, lust and grief.

Though irreverence and a generational malaise might hover at the poems’ edges, tenderness forms their centre, as when Zhang encounters a house on the back of a truck in the small hours of the morning:

I would say look!
how lucky we are
to know that magic still happens
if we stay awake to see it

With humour, vulnerability and flair, these collections navigate being young in precarious times – and mark the arrival of three confident new voices in New Zealand poetry.