Family Instructions Upon Release

'I have no words'.

This is so often our response to grief and loss, when dealing with it ourselves orconsoling others. Elizabeth's father took his own life in 2012. Unable to find words ofher own to write about what had happened, Elizabeth took them instead from the 2006Penguin Classics edition of Twelve Angry Men, a play she and her father attended together when Elizabeth was a teenager, and combined these with the New Zealand Government's Fact Sheet 4 Suicide and Self-Harm. Armed with this limited dictionary, she was able to write poems that are by turns mournful, angry and searching. The cumulative effect is surprising in its narrative drive and cathartic power.

Featured in the 14 October 2019 New Zealand newsletter.
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