(she/her)
Miss Dust
Seraph Press, 2015
Meet Miss Dust: mother, child, teacher, cheater, lover, liver, dreamer, enthusiastic coffee drinker and star of this new collection by much-admired poet Johanna Aitchison.
This playful and twisty two-part harmony begins with the Miss Dust sequence, and concludes with more wide-ranging poems with the same mixture of the bleak and funny, and Aitchison’s trademark inventive and frequently surreal use of language.
Miss Dust is an exciting development in the work of an original poetic voice.
Reviews
“I am large, I contain multitudes.” So wrote Walt Whitman in his seminal Song of Myself – and it’s a line that could well be “sung” by Miss Dust, the central figure in Johanna Aitchison’s new collection. Miss Dust is the title of the book and also the name of its curious protagonist. She does, indeed, contain multitudes: she’s a shape-shifter, a seductive word-weaver, a trier-on of guises and disguises and multiple personas ...The language is finely wrought and densely packed; imagery is blazingly strange. It’s Emily Dickinson for the 21st century: precise and odd, delicate and fierce, resisting the actual and the literal – and reasserting time and again the immense power of the individual imagination and the sheer wilful force of words.”
Sarah Quigley, author of The Divorce Diaries
“Miss Dust, Aitchison's third poetry collection, adds to her accomplishments. It's a book in two parts. The first focuses upon the titular heroine, Miss Dust and her navigation through everything from online dating, coffee consumption motherhood and a teaching career. The female-focused themes which result, including autonomy, nurture versus nature and religion, extend into the book's second half. Here, for instance, standout poems like the prize-winning, Jun see a New Zealand tutor reflect upon her Japanese students, and the concluding piece, Full bloom discuss the exacting nature of creativity. The outcome is a powerful poetry collection which, while meditating upon identity and belonging, assimilation and extrication, embraces the personal experience as a means to speak about the public and political.”
Siobhan Harvey, author of Cloud Boy
“What catches me with these new poems is the heightened degree of surprise. This is poetry tilted on its axis. The first section is devoted to a sequence that gives life to Miss Dust. When read together, the section forms a long narrative poem, or perhaps you could say, a long character poem in pieces. In trying to liken the startling effect of reading this life, I came up with a hybrid analogy: it is like an Eleanor Rigby portrait meets a Salvador Dali painting meets a dislocating dream state meets a short film by Alison Maclean meets Edward Lear meets a veiled memoir.”
Paula Green, co-author of 99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry