People from the Pit Stand Up

July 2018

112 pages (with flaps), illustrations throughout

This is the voice of someone who is both at home and not at home in the world. Sam Duckor-Jones’s wonderfully fresh, funny, dishevelled poems are alive with art-making and fuelled by a hunger for intimacy. Giant clay men lurk in salons, the lawns of poets overgrow, petrolheads hoon along the beach, birds cry ‘wow-okay, wow-okay, wow-okay’.

‘Sex and longing, tenderness and pain, quest and invention, togetherness and solitude: if that’s not the queer experience, I don’t know what is.’
—Kerry Donovan Brown

‘Gorgeous and contrary.’ 
—Jenny Bornholdt

‘If attention is an act of love, then this is a collection that attends to art and life in such a way as to collapse any distinction between the two.’ 
—Chris Price

'It's distinctive and authentic and vividly (it seems to me) Sam's own voice. Bloody fantastic.'
—John Campbell

Sam Duckor-Jones is a sculptor and poet. He won the Biggs Poetry Prize from Victoria University of Wellington in 2017. ​People from the Pit Stand Up​ is his first book.