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In her latest collection, Louise Wallace raises an existential eyebrow at pregnancy-birth-motherhood. Is this universal rite-of-passage really an intimately personal event, down to the degree of fluid rising in your ankles, or is it a societal machine, forever churning out the next generation to an unrelenting voiceover of parenting advice? Wrestling auto-generated Huggies text and her own sometimes heart-breaking experiences into meaning, Wallace weighs the evidence. With equal parts curiosity and pique, she writes her way through to the human.
'Wallace’s exquisite poems declare that women’s lives matter (mothers or otherwise), and domestic and emotional labour matters because this unseen and undervalued work permits society to function. Few other poets capture the possibilities of domestic mess so well, and make me laugh at the same time.' —Sarah Jane Barnett
Praise for Bad Things
'There is a freshness and a daring at work here, because the poetry seems beholden only to its own choreography. I love that. I can’t think of another book quite like it.' —Paula Green
Louise Wallace is the author of three previous collections of poems. She is the founder and editor of Starling, an online journal publishing the work of young writers from Aotearoa, and the editor of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2008, winning the Biggs Prize for Poetry, and was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin in 2015. She grew up in Gisborne and now lives on the Otago Peninsula in Ōtepoti with her husband and their young son.
Cover: Anna Perry
