A highly anticipated first poetry collection that is raw and warm and human.

In summer when I picked dandelions
for the geriatric guinea pig I changed the world.
I killed a weed. I filled a mouth with gold.

In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at its heart a sequence of emotionally raw ‘Cremation Sonnets’. In its essence, this collection is the poet exploring ‘goodness’: ‘I am unbegrudging. I am the openest pair of arms’, she tells us. ‘I am a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.’

I cannot accept this ending. I have fallen
from the highest ledge. I will never land.
So what if I am safe? I am not.

Author

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

Endorsements

‘No Good is a psychologically astute, honed, vividly rendered collection from a strong, engaging new writer. It is technically taut; it confronts rough emotional territory in its overt articulation of longing, dejection, sorrow, melancholy and loss. Yet despite all this, it often sparkles with warmth, an irrepressible sense of the whimsical and quirky, and with images as clear, unpretentious and startlingly fresh as lawn daisies.’
— Emma Neale

‘Sophie van Waardenberg’s debut makes good on all the promise of her AUP New Poets 5 collection and appearances in New Zealand and US journals. No Good has the humour and heart-on-sleeve emotion displayed in her previously published work but makes use of the fuller scope of a book-length collection to take the reader into more complex and emotionally fraught territory. It is a book that can be both warm and (in the best sense) difficult, frequently within the same poem or sequence. The first full collection by van Waardenberg is something that has been highly anticipated by Aotearoa poetry fans for several years, and No Good is a triumphant blend of elegy and love poems, heartbreak and hope, journeys and homecomings.’
— Francis Cooke