Tightrope

We are what we remember, the self is a trick of memory . . . history is the remembered tightrope that stretches across the abyss of all that we have forgotten - Maualaivao Albert Wendt.

Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika poetry warrior Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether stories really can cure the incurable.

In Marsh's poetry, sharp intelligence combines a focused warrior fierceness with perceptive humour and energy, upheld by the mana of the Pacific. She mines rich veins the tradition and culture of her whanau and Pacific nations; the works of feminist poets and leaders; words of distinguished poets Derek Walcott and Albert Wendt to probe the particularities of words and cultures.

Selina Tusitala Marsh's Tightrope takes us from the bustle of the world's largest Polynesian city, Auckland, through Avondale and Apia, and on to London and New York on an extraordinary poetic voyage.

Selina Tusitala Marsh draws on nursery rhymes, riddles, spells, Pasifika chants, popular song, rap as well as on high modernist and postmodernist literature to produce a new collection that is spiky and fierce, brash and vital, by turns, comic, irreverent, poignant, rhapsodic, anthemic, confrontational. David Eggleton.