Two new titles from A.U.P.

Tightrope

Selina Tusitala Marsh
Auckland University Press
9781869408725
Paperback, 230 x 165 mm, 112 pages
21 AUGUST 2017, $27.99
Poetry

We are what we remember, the self is a trick of memory . . . history is the remembered tightrope that stretches across the abyss of all that we have forgotten– Maualaivao Albert Wendt

Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika poetry warrior Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether ‘stories’ really can ‘cure the incurable’.

In Marsh’s poetry, sharp intelligence combines a focused warrior fierceness with perceptive humour and energy, upheld by the mana of the Pacific. She mines rich veins – the tradition and culture of her whanau and Pacific nations; the works of feminist poets and leaders; words of distinguished poets Derek Walcott and Albert Wendt – to probe the particularities of words and cultures.

Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Tightrope takes us from the bustle of the world’s largest Polynesian city,Auckland, through Avondale and Apia, and on to London and New York on an extraordinary poetic voyage.

Selina Tusitala Marsh is of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English and French descent. She was the first Pacific Islander to graduate with a PhD in English from The University of Auckland and is now a lecturerin the English Department, specialising in Pasifika literature. Marsh

represented Tuvalu at the London Olympics Poetry Parnassus event in 2012; her work has been translated into Ukrainian and Spanish and has appeared in numerous forms live in schools, museums, parks, billboards, print and online literary journals. As Commonwealth Poet (2016) she composed and performed for the Queen at Westminster Abbey.
 

Teenager -The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand

Chris Brickell
Auckland University Press
9781869408688
Paperback, 248 x 190 mm, 340 pages
24 July 2017, $49.99

Teenagers is a ground-breaking history of young people in New Zealand from the nineteenth century to the 1960s.

‘With a broad social and cultural sweep, the book brings young people to the centre of the New Zealand story.’ – Bronwyn Dalley, co-author of Frontier of Dreams: The Story of New Zealand

‘Panoramic in its scope, with a wonderful teeming sense of past lives and sensibilities.’ – Melissa Bellanta, author of Larrikins: A History

Through their diaries and letters, photographs and drawings, we meet young New Zealanders as they transition from children to adults: sealers and bushfellers, factory girls and newspaper boys, the male ‘mashers’ of the 1880s and the female ‘flappers’ of the 1910s and ’20s, schoolgirls and rock’n’rollers, larrikins and louts.

 By taking us inside the lives of young New Zealanders, the book illuminates from a new angle large-scale changes in our society: the rise and fall of domestic service, the impact of compulsory education, the movement of Pākehā and then Māori from country to city, the rise of consumer culture and popular psychology. Teenagers shows us how young people made sense of their personal and social transformations: in language and song and dress, at dances and picnics and social clubs, in talking and playing and reading.

Teenagers provides an intimate and evocative insight into the lives of young people and the history of New Zealand.

Chris Brickell is an associate professor in gender studies at the University of Otago. His first book, Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand (2008) won the NZSA E. H. McCormick Best First Book Award for Non-Fiction in the 2009 Montana Book Awards. His other books are Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant, 1885–1915 (2012), Two-by-Two: Men in Pairs (2013) and Southern Men: Gay Lives in Pictures (2014). He has published on the history and sociology of sexuality, masculinity and adolescence in many international journals, including Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Sociological Review, Rethinking History, Visual Anthropology, Gender, Place & Culture and Journal of Social History.