A surprising and genre-bending poetic memoir about the years when everything got weirder.

I write not to communicate or reveal but to mull and conceal, but I guess that’s a form of communication too, of connection, of little anchors, little hooks, little holes you can put your eye up to, your heart up to, and maybe you will see something you will recognise.

In her new collection – a poetic collage-essay-memoir – Helen Rickerby crafts poems out of personal correspondence and sentences from her journals, cataloguing her life over a tumultuous period of lockdowns, terrorist attacks and mid-life crises.

In glimpses of the day-to-day, in occasional bits of Italian homework and dining-room dance parties, pieces of a life are constructed into a sensuous yet disarming whole. Through friendships and grief, joy and love, combining wry humour with philosophical musing, Rickerby reflects on doubt, gaps, the nature of poetry, connection and disconnection, and not going quietly into middle age.

My Bourgeois Apocalypse is a work of fragments encompassing the whole of a life.

Author

Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She has previously published four and a half collections of poetry, including How to Live (Auckland University Press, 2019), which won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Rickerby single-handedly ran Seraph Press, a boutique but significant publisher of New Zealand poetry, and was co-managing editor of literary journal JAAM from 2005 to 2015. She earns a crust as an editor and technical writer.

Endorsements

‘This is a dazzling work, part notebook, part memoir, part puzzle. The reader might feel played like a fish, lured in with a line that seems to be leading to a scene, or a situation, only to find themselves disoriented by a change of pronoun, a detail out of place, a movement in time. Before long it becomes apparent that the sentences do not quite read consecutively, but by now the reader is hooked by the text’s strange rhythms, narrative threads and depths of passionate feeling.’
— Anna Jackson