The difficult second album from the author of I Am in Bed with You.

I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across a wooden floor in a house where the sun has only just returned. I am a musical phrase. I am a lead light. I am a host. I am seven different names. I am all the fat in my body. I am the sky when it is early spring and I can’t believe I exist in this colour range. I am so blue.

If We Knew How to We Would answers a question nobody asked: How many thoughts can you work into a single poem?

Through breakups and a pandemic, health issues and deaths, Emma Barnes’s second collection is a riveting, overflowing and grief-stricken reckoning with the ordinary: a skinful of spit; insides scooped out with a melon baller; cracked like an egg and nothing inside. ‘It is too much to say nothing about. It is nothing to say too much about.’

Author

Emma Barnes (Pākehā, they/them) studied at the University of Canterbury and lives in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Their poetry has been published in journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Cordite and Best New Zealand Poems (2008, 2010, 2021). They performed in Show Ponies in 2022 and 2023. They are the author of the poetry collection I Am in Bed with You (AUP, 2021) and co-editor with Chris Tse of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (AUP, 2021). They work in tech and spend a lot of time picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.

Endorsements

‘I’m excited by the restless curiosity and energy and linguistic do-it-yourself grab-bagging expansiveness of Barnes’s poetics. They have very energetic ears, tuning into jargon and cliché and tender private moments and everything in between, all the way from the boardroom or the IT training centre to the Tinder date or the living room. And the poems, taken together, move in ways that work as a collection.’
— Dougal McNeill, Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington

‘If We Knew How to We Would is a more sombre collection than I Am in Bed with You. More grounded. More earnest, struck through with melancholy and a refined sort of yearning. Instead of exploding outwards, this new work is more attuned to the rhythms of repetition, cycles, uncertainties and grief.’
— Dani Yourukova

‘Reading poetry by Emma Barnes is always exciting. It’s like stepping into a land where surprising metaphors become concrete, three-dimensional, animated. Where thoughts and feelings take on corporeal form and walk around – they might try to shrink themselves into nothing, they might grow into strong giants. These poems sometimes sizzle with sensuous eroticism, sometimes they flirt with self-hatred, but they remind us that we live in bodies, in the world inhabited by other people, with all the joys and pains, lusts and griefs that brings.’
— Helen Rickerby