Beside Herself

‘All of my best lines are accidents’, Chris Price writes in this book, and proceeds to prove that she has the knack of putting herself in harm’s way and the skill to build from there. Beside Herself plays with character, and with language, and with the way the one works on the other. Pronouns and personae shift and dance in this book in the same way that meanings do – ‘After the expected, the unexpected. / After the unexpected, the formal handrail / and the overflow.’ Price has always been attentive to the unlooked-for delights of language – she is a master of the riddling word-play poem – and uses this play in the service of something larger, an exploration of character and persona and perspective.

Chris Price is based in Wellington, where she teaches the poetry MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. Her first collection of poems, Husk, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry and her next book, the genre-busting Brief Lives, was shortlisted in the biography category in the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.