Liz Breslin Releases Her New Collection Of Poetry 'show you're working out'

July 31, 2025: Liz Breslin is a writer, editor and performer of Polish, Irish and English descent, now living in Ōtepoti in Aotearoa.

Liz’s previous full-length poem collections are in bed with the feminists (Dead Bird Books, 2021), winner of the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems 2020, and Alzheimer’s and a Spoon (OUP, 2017), one of the NZ Listener’s Top 100 books of 2017. In June 2025 Liz was a headline performer at Verse On! Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe, in Vienna, Austria. Liz loves performing and facilitating at events, and has dabbled also in slam competitions, being the Otago regional slam champ in 2023, almost a decade after coming second runner up at the National Slam in 2014. Liz is the co-creator of the documentary rail:lines, a spoke’n’word tour of the Otago Central Rail Trail with Laura Williamson and Annabel Wilson, and of the possibilities project with Ōtepoti Te Puna Auaha Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature. Liz also co-edited HOOT! words from the Ōtepoti Writers Lab community 2019-2024 with Eliana Gray.

Today Liz releases 'show you're working out' (published by Dead Bird Books) uses poems as a means of queer exploration of Pākehā stories of gender, space and violence in the rural south of Te Waipounamu.

Liz explains "The poems in 'show you’re working out' centre around Pākehā women’s and queer stories in the rural south of Te Waipounamu, including my own stories. The play on ‘your’/’you’re’ destabilises the title, showing the anxiety of my working out and showing readers that this collection doesn’t contain a singular story. Showing that you’re working out is what it can feel important to do in a relationship, or a small community, when you want to be accepted. 'show you’re working out is what the maths exams of my school days said. Put marks on the page to signify the thinking that you have done."

"In this collection of poems I show both kinds of working out through poems that navigate the personal and structural effects of colonisation on Pākehā, how we are complicit, how we are bruised. If there is a temporal arc, it’s not quite as simple as a trajectory from the violences and silences of domestic abuse to the joy of queer horizons, but some days it feels that way. Some physical work outs, such as Pilates and yoga, also make it into the poems, and there is physicality at work in the working out of the poems. Many were made using cut and paste techniques, whether by digital means or with paper and scissors and glue and threads."

The book is in three sections:

"‘when i leave the house i smile’ contains poems about living in an abusive marriage. It’s often difficult to write about such experiences because trauma leaves memory gaps, because of what we’re not supposed to say in public and because anyway it’s too big to look at all at once. Using different poem forms and games for this section was a way to trick myself into the writing – whether in an unfinished acrostic poem such as ‘I thought I hid it well’ or a remix of a Shakespearean sonnet I had to memorise at school with unhelpful things that people have said to me that I’ve also memorised, in ‘admit impediments’. Domestic violence affects one in three New Zealand women (the rates are higher for Māori and Pasifika women, and for LGBTTQIA+ people) and the evidence of it is everywhere once you start to look. Looking overseas, ‘blue and black or black and blue?’ looks at the story behind the blue and black or white and gold dress that went viral in 2015. How we look can shape what we see and in 2024 Kier Johston, whose wedding the dress was worn to, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for abusing his wife Grace, whose mother wore the dress."

"‘And seeing that’ joins up Pākehā stories over colonised time in rural southern spaces. Some of the poems come from studying the life of Hannah Hayes, who grew up in England and arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1882 with her husband, who went on to become a famous inventor. His story is well-known in the rural south whereas hers is told in a single paragraph in a family history folder at Hayes Engineering, which tells that in 1896 she went travelling around for three months by bicycle to all the farms in the area, selling his inventions and saving the family business. So she’s someone who has been erased by colonised history making, while also at the same time upholding it by selling the tools that ran the farms on land stolen from Māori. Hannah’s story was a way into writing about colonised living, a story that, in some ways, mirrors my own. I also came from England to Aotearoa with a man, ‘settled’ in the rural south and subsumed my life to his. Imagining other possibilities for Hannah’s life, as I do, for example, in ‘Colonise your own adventure’, help me to imagine other possibilities for my own. I also imagined other possibilities for Pākehā women across colonised times, making queer stories out of sewing boxes and scissors, and mixing words about bike riding from the 1890s and now."

"‘Born to deviations’ continues the wider and queerer lens on the Pākehā experience that I started in the previous section. Under colonisation, queer people have always been told we’ve got the wrong bodies and that they’re in the wrong places. The poems in this section show my working out of how to be a queer body in rural spaces, against and among what we call ‘nature’ and against and among white supremacy. They look queerly at rural popular culture, for example, looking for queer joy in readings of Sharon from the Speight’s ads in ‘of course there are other ways of reading Sharon’ and thinking about the queerness of The Farmer Wants a Wife in ‘Notes from heterosexual reality tv’. This section also contains some of the most overtly political poems in the collection (though everything is of course political), such as ‘Pilates could happen to anyone’ which shows its working out in making connections between wellness culture and white supremacy. Though its by no means happy ever after, the collection ends on a kind of hopeful note, with poems of community, of feminist, queer and tangata Tiriti possibilities for being Pākehā in the rural south."

To celebrate the release of 'show you’re working out' Liz will be hosting a number of events over the following week, appearing in Wānaka, Ōtepoti, Timaru, Ōtautahi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara and Tāmaki Makaurau.

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