Ransack

In ransack, essa may ranapiri addresses the difficulty of assembling and understanding a fractured, unwieldy self through an inherited language—a language whose assumptions and expectations ultimately make it inadequate for such a task. These poems seek richer, less hierarchical sets of words to describe ways of being. Punctuated by a sequence of letters to Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando, this immersive collection is about discovering, articulating, and defending—to oneself and to others—what it means to exist outside of the western gender binary, as takatapui. It describes an artist in a state of becoming, moving from Te Kore, through Te Po, and into the light.

essa may ranapiri (Ngati Raukawa) is a poet from Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa. They are part of the local writing group Puku.riri|Liv.id. Their work has appeared previously in Mayhem, Poetry NZ, Brief, Sport, Starling, Mimicry, THEM, and POETRY Magazine. They graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington in 2018. They will write until they’re dead.