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If We Knew How to We Would
Brief Description
I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need...
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If We Knew How to We Would
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$2499
Elsewhere:
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The difficult second album from the author of I Am in Bed with You.
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Description
I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across a wooden floor in a house where the sun has only just returned. I am a musical phrase. I am a lead light. I am a host. I am seven different names. I am all the fat in my body. I am the sky when it is early spring and I can't believe I exist in this colour range. I am so blue.
If We Knew How to We Would answers a question nobody asked: How many thoughts can you work into a single poem? Through breakups and a pandemic, health issues and deaths, Emma Barnes's second collection is a riveting, overflowing and grief-stricken reckoning with the ordinary: a skinful of spit; insides scooped out with a melon baller; cracked like an egg and nothing inside. 'It is too much to say nothing about. It is nothing to say too much about.'
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781776711888
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 11 September 2025
Country: New Zealand
Imprint: Auckland University Press
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 6.0mm
Width: 150.0mm
Height: 238.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 80
About the Author
Emma BarnesΒ (PΔkehΔ, they/them) studied at the University of Canterbury and lives in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Their poetry has been published in journals includingΒ Landfall,Β Turbine | Kapohau,Β CorditeΒ andΒ Best New Zealand PoemsΒ (2008, 2010, 2021). They performed in Show Ponies in 2022 and 2023. They are the author of the poetry collectionΒ I Am in Bed with YouΒ (AUP, 2021) and co-editor with Chris Tse ofΒ Out Here: An Anthology of TakatΔpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from AotearoaΒ (AUP, 2021). They work in tech and spend a lot of time picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.
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