(2025) by Hana Pera Aoake
2025, paperback
96 pages, 108 x 178 mm
first edition, edition of 100
no more poetry are honoured to welcome the second poetry collection from artist, curator and writer Hana Pera Aoake titled Blame It On The Rain. the book begins with a placenta placed into a Pohutukawa tree and spirals out across manifold interrogations and anecdotes of the poet’s life. the poetry harnesses a vibrant decolonial commentary on the life/death cycle:
“Bodies that span the past, present and future
It’s non linear, omnipresent, human and non human”
The poetry maps ways in which the lived and living memories of colonial histories are held, endured and warped inside one’s body, which is to say the whole Earth. “Pain and age are knotted together” she states. In many ways the book attempts to illustrate a delicate symbiosis of all living and non-living things, yet localises the pain and joy which manifests from these systems within her own life. The poetry asks how ideology changes the way we love, parent and make art.
Hana Pera Aoake expands these cyclical frameworks of flux and impermanence across her otherwise diaristic and witty verse. Hana Pera Aoake writes on sculpture, anger, labor, detention, greed, genocide, the ocean, the family, sovereignty, sanity and love. The writing spares no opportunity for irony and opinion, housing articulations of political dreaming within a resilient and potent humour. The book is generous in its exploration of Māori belief systems and indigenous solidarity as much as it is on rhythmic, free-associative verse. An exciting and expansive collection of poems.
“I was once bacteria.
It once rained and rained until small pools became oceans.
Then the water evaporated and the seas became empty.
Then an explosion caused by Ruuaumoko filled the world with water again.
I will become bacteria again.”
— daniel ward
editor (poetry)
reflects on Blame It On The Rain
by Hana Pera Aoake
pre-orders will be shipped directly
following the publication launch on
23/04/2025
(2025) by Amrita Hepi