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Scorpio Books and At The Bay I Te Kokoru warmly welcome you to the Ōtautahi Christchurch launch of Motion Sickness by Michelle Elvy. This event will feature poetry readings from James Norcliffe, Erik Kennedy, Rachel Smith, Claudia Herz Jardine, Tania Roxborogh and the author.All welcome, this is a free event. Refreshments provided from 5.30pm for a 6pm start. Please send in your RSVP.
About the book
Right now, there is a real need for poetry to confront world issues, and this is exactly what Michelle Elvy does here. Her remarkable fusion of the personal, the political, the imaginative is raw, beautiful, defiant and – importantly – hopeful. – Anne Kennedy
With each poem, Motion Sickness unfolds like a map charting the distance between individual and collective memory. Michelle Elvy’s accomplished collection is intimate in detail but never loses sight of the world around us, attentive to the light and shadow that accompanies our journeys through life. – Chris Tse
A rich, exploratory collection with global reach, shifting from the domestic to the open ocean, which is not some idyllic image of freedom, but a place, like everywhere on this planet, subject to damage and deterioration. These poems hold the horror of global collapse, along with beauty, clarity, delight in the present moment and an awareness of its fragility. – Fiona Farrell
These are poems that pulse with anger, memory and hope, each one like a fireseed, some fierce, all bright. With a roving, questing intelligence, Elvy seeks to consecrate and conserve the natural world, yet she also has a sharp eye for the gleaming wire of irony. Here there is the flash and strike of a smart wit. The weight of things folded in these poems. The sense of a stone of grief lodged in the throat. And yet the urge to go on singing. – Emma Neale
About the author
Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor and creative writing teacher in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Originally from the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, she arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2008 aboard her sailboat, her home for nearly twenty years. Her books include the everrumble, a small novel in small forms, and the hybrid story collection the other side of better. Her new collection is Motion Sickness – shortlisted in the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award and Runner up in the 2026 John O'Connor Award. Michelle’s recent anthology work includes Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages (edited with Vaughan Rapatahana), Poto: Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero | Short: The big book of small stories (edited with Kiri Piahana-Wong), with 100 stories in English and te reo Māori, and MAYDAY (edited with David Eggleton and Siobhan Harvey) – a gathering of voices from Aotearoa, an urgent out to the world, coming later this year.
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Event venue
Scorpio Books, Scorpio Books, 120 Hereford St, Christchurch Central, Christchurch 8011, New Zealand, Christchurch
Tickets
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