The Intimacy Bus

Overview

In The Intimacy Bus, award-winning poet Janet Charman reckons with some of life’s heaviest traffic: bereavement, grief, ageing, loneliness, gender, sexual identity, power and inequality. Along the way, the collection gathers up encounters with friends and strangers, and reflections on matters as various as Korean telenovelas, classic films, personal memories, ‘modern life’, real estate, ‘sex treats’, companion animals, a favourite hairdresser, finding joy, a grandmother’s politics and the rapper Psy. Shorn of sentiment, direct and uncompromising, Janet Charman’s The Intimacy Bus arrives as an irrepressible affirmation of love, life and lesbian desire.

Author Biography

Janet Charman is one of New Zealand’s sharpest and most subversive writers. The Intimacy Bus is Charman’s tenth collection of poetry. In 2008 she won the Montana Book Award for Poetry for Cold Snack. In 2009 she was a visiting fellow at the International Writers’ workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2014 she appeared as a guest reader at the Taipei International Poetry Forum. Her most recent poetry collection, The Pistils (Otago University Press, 2022) was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2023 New Zealand Ockham Book Awards.