This is your real name

Overview

Unflinching poems exploring identity, loss, and the modern world.

Elizabeth Morton's poems look at a raw and unstable world—the crash, the aftermath, the comeback, 'the black heat at the centre of things.' Charged with visceral energy, this collection offers poetry as incantation: an intense, tactile experience. The reader is drawn into a dreamscape of creeks and bogs, a fiery meadow, and the guts of the sea, set against a contemporary backdrop of Pokémon and hospital cubicles.

These poems trace a dislocation between voices and the worlds they inhabit—a strangely askew New Zealand, a mythological America, in liminal spaces where identity and meaning blur. Jammed full of want, need, despair, love, and politics, This is your real name is for readers of contemporary poetry and New Zealand literature who seek darkly funny, unsettling writing that strips all the meat from the bones, 'always writing the same story.'

Reviews

Author Biography