On an early spring night in Manhattan last year, the Texan-born comedian, poet, and actor Catherine Cohen attended a party where the Māori poet Tayi Tibble was in attendance, visiting all the way from New Zealand. After hearing Tayi read a piece from her book Poūkahangatus, Catherine suggested she come share her work at Club Cumming downtown, where Cat was hosting a weekly, eclectic “Cabernet Caberet.” Though they’d only just met, these two poets from opposite sides of the globe had been in dialogue on the page all along.

wtn boys  by Tayi Tibble

soft wellington boys in six hundred  dollar leather want to send me their poetry  & tie me to their beds so I tell them I like their  fathers instead & listen to their aluminium skulls  crack like coke cans and thunder.

road trip poem #17  by Catherine Cohen

I’m jealous of everyone and wouldn’t change a thing  every time we have sex I tell you  it’s one for the record books  and you say something can’t be special  if everything is. boys love drumming on stuff  boys love taking their shirt off with one hand  oh my god experience  whatever pleasure you can in this life  for example I’m at mcdonald’s right now

. .

More on these books and authors: 

Learn more about Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble and follow her @paniaofthekeef on Instagram and Twitter.

Learn more about God I Feel Modern Tonight by Catherine Cohen and follow her @catccohen on Instagram.

See Catherine Cohen’s Netflix special, “The Twist...? She’s Gorgeous,” which integrates poetry with comedy, streaming here.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

Poūkahangatus: Poems

By Tayi Tibble.

Design by Linda Huang.

Title: Poukahangatus | Author: Tayi Tibble | Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group (2022)

Q&A with Tayi Tibble

M: Can you tell us a bit about the title of your collection?

T: Poukahangatus is a transliteration of Pocahontas, articulated in Te Reo Maori phonetics. It doesn’t have an actual or complete meaning in Maori, but broken down, ‘pou’ means a pillar, a column, a totem, and ‘kaha’ means strength or bravery, and I like those meanings being present in the title for the collection.

The title is also lifted from the opening essay, ‘Poukahangatus: An Essay about Indigenous Hair Do’s and Don’ts’ and just as the essay explores, I think as a title, Poukahangatus suggests themes of indigenous representation, appropriation, story sovereignty and reclamation, which are recurring and the undercurrent of the collection.

M: This was your debut--what was it like shaping it, and what have you worked on since?

T: I wrote Poukahangatus while I was studying towards my MFA at the International Institute of Modern Letters, so it was shaped through workshops, supervision and a year of concentrated study which was all super helpful to both the book's development, and my own development as a writer. It was an intense but very rewarding experience — it was the first time I had ever explored my culture, my family, the history and impact of colonization in my writing and in New Zealand at the time, there was a bit of a gap in our literature that held both Te Ao Maori (the maori world) and the modern, globalized world of pop culture and the internet, so writing into that space was very fertile, but in part, sort of vulnerable too.

Since then, I wrote a second collection Rangikura, which will also be published by Knopf at a later date. It’s similar to Poukahangatus with its themes of family and colonization, but its parameters are a little tighter, and the intensity turned up — it has an undercurrent of climate change urgency; exploring the relationship between the desecration of the earth and desecration of indigenous women. I’m currently also starting a third collection, but it’s taking its time to reveal itself.

M: There's a range of forms in your first collection. Can you talk a bit about the prose poems that anchor the opening and appear throughout?

T: I’m interested in prose poems because I am interested in storytelling. I write poetry of course, but I also consider my poems to be, and want my poems to serve as, a form of indigenous storytelling; a way to capture and articulate our indigenous knowledge and experiences, and pass them along through generations.

I guess I like how prose poems invite density, generosity, and exploration while also offering the visual cue or expectation that there might be a narrative drive or a story. Many of the prose poems in Poukahangatus have a narrative drive or tell stories. For example, ‘Tangi in The King Country’ is a series of prose poems that tell the story of two small children returning to their marae or ancestral lands for the first time. In another poem titled ‘Pania’ a relationship between an exotic dancer and her client is told over three blocks of prose, which also draws on the traditional myth of Pania of The Reef, a sea maiden from the Ngati Kahungungu tribe of Aotearoa. It’s important to me as a writer to share the stories of my people, and prose poems are a functional way to do this. I like playing with dense blocks of text, but still working the language enough to make it feel light and sing like poetry.

M: Are there any other books or works of art with which you feel your work is in conversation?

T: I’m not sure if they're in conversation with, but the books that spoke to me as I was writing Poukahangatus, and in turn helped me to find my voice and speak with courage and confidence were Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire and Fale Aitu by Tusiata Avia. They sort of formed the atmosphere I wanted to write into, these passionate wahine writing about power and ancestry with truth and reclamation

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  [*] Download PDF Here => Poukahangatus: Poems

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 The American debut of an acclaimed young poet as she explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation.Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Po?kahangatus (pronounced "Pocahontas"), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies--Greek, M?ori, feminist, kiwi--peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight to exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions ("The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard"). Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and

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Download Or Read PDF Poukahangatus: Poems - Tayi Tibble Free Full Pages Online With Audiobook.

  [*] Download PDF Visit Here => https://forsharedpdf.site/59382078

[*] Read PDF Visit Here => https://forsharedpdf.site/59382078

The American debut of an acclaimed young poet as she explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation.Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Po?kahangatus (pronounced "Pocahontas"), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies--Greek, M?ori, feminist, kiwi--peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight to exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions ("The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard"). Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and

Poukahangatus by Tayi Tibble | Book Review

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