The Sea Walks into a Wall

A biting new collection by award-winning poet Anne Kennedy. In The Sea Walks into a Wall, the natural world around us hits back. The sea crashes its glass onto the bar. You watch from afar. You’d take it all back if you could. Everything. You’d go down there and you’d. And talks back too. If I’m fucked, you’re coming with me. Sincerely, the stream. From rainy Ihumatao to London’s Kew Gardens, in the face of seas and streams, ducks and dogs, black drops and bureaucracies, humans bumble through. Without distractions you’d rush through your life like chi through an empty room. You bump into a baby and that takes up eighteen years. Love fills the room like a maze. Intelligent, playful, witty, and innovative, these poems bite where it hurts.

Anne Kennedy is the author of three novels, a novella, four books of poetry, and many anthologised short stories. Her first book of poetry Sing-song was named Poetry Book of the Year at the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The Darling North won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry, and Moth Hour was a poetry finalist at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Anne has also won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland, the IIML, and at the University of at Hawai‘i. She has taught creative writing for a number of years