Beside Herself, Chris Price

Beside Herself, Chris Price

A new collection of poems from award-winning poet Chris Price is a playful triumph.

‘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: ‘I am every character – every, every character’. These characters appear from a variety of times, places and fictions, from contemporary Wellington to medieval England. A selection of beautifully crafted, riddling poems of persons and personae, truths and falsehoods, frank identities and masked selves, Beside Herselfis a playful triumph.

I’m . . . compelled by Chris Price’s technical finesse, her wit, the way she takes on and takes in so much from such diverse places, and threads it to something so splendidly her own. – Vincent O’Sullivan

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 2002 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Price’s next book, the genre-busting Brief Lives, was shortlisted in the biography category in the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Brief Liveswent on to win the 2007 PANZ Book Design Award for Best Non-Illustrated Book. Auckland University Press released Price’s third book, The Blind Singer, in 2009.

Chris Price was the winner of the 2011 New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize. She has long been known for her contributions to literary life in New Zealand. From 1992 to 2004, she co-ordinated the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week, and she was editor of Landfall from 1993 to 2000. Price was the 2008 CNZ/Auckland University Writer in residence at the Michael King Writers Centre.

ENDS

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