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No Good

Brief Description
In summer when I picked dandelionsfor the geriatric guinea pig I changed the world.I killed a weed. I filled a mouth with gold. In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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No Good

A highly anticipated first poetry collection that is raw and warm and human.

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In summer when I picked dandelions
for the geriatric guinea pig I changed the world.
I killed a weed. I filled a mouth with gold.

In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at its heart a sequence of emotionally raw ‘Cremation Sonnets’. In its essence, this collection is the poet exploring ‘goodness’: ‘I am unbegrudging. I am the openest pair of arms’, she tells us. ‘I am a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.’

I cannot accept this ending. I have fallen
from the highest ledge. I will never land.
So what if I am safe? I am not.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781776711789

Publisher: Auckland University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 14 August 2025

Country: New Zealand

Imprint: Auckland University Press

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 160.0mm

Height: 210.0mm

Weight: 0g

Pages: 72

About the Author

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

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