A Good Handful

This poetry anthology was conceived as something of a stunt to heighten the visibility of New Zealand writers. All the contributors are New Zealanders, and all of the more than 100 poems address the topic of sex—not love, just sex. The result is a collection that tackles sex from every angle, including the comic in Karl Stead's "The Clodian Songbook," the confessional in Rachel McAlpine's "A Frightened Poem about My Breasts," the metaphysical in James K. Baxter's "On the Death of Her Body," and the just plain horny in Vincent O'Sullivan's "Remembering Westmere."

Stu Bagby is the author of As It Was in the Beginning and was the 2000 winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society's International Poetry Competition.