This Is Your Real Name

Discover the powerful poetry of Elizabeth Morton in her striking collection, 'In Lieu of Flowers, Bring Weeds'. This paperback edition, published by Otago University Press, features 72 pages of unflinching verses that explore the depths of identity and existence within an unstable world. Morton’s work delves into themes of need, love, despair, and politics, blending the contemporary with the mythological. Readers are invited into dreamlike landscapes, where familiar elements like Pokémon and The Cosby Show collide with haunting imagery of creeks, bogs, and the ocean's guts. With dimensions of 150 x 230 mm, this thoughtfully crafted book offers an intense and tactile experience, compelling readers to confront the layers of dislocation between voices and their realities. Journey through Morton’s unique perspective on New Zealand and beyond, and reflect on questions of identity and the names we are known by. Ideal for poetry lovers seeking authenticity and depth, this collection is a testament to the art of fine poetry. Uncover the visceral energy of Morton's words, as they resonate with universal truths about what it means to be alive and aware in today’s world.

Author: Elizabeth Morton Publisher: Otago University Press
Bind: paperback
Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm
Pages: 72
Publication Date: 01-02-2020

In lieu of flowers, bring weeds. Elizabeth Morton’s poems look unflinchingly at a raw and unstable world - the crash, the aftermath, the comeback, ‘the black heat at the centre of things’. The poems in Morton’s second collection are charged with a visceral energy. This is poetry as incantation: an intense, larger-than-life, tactile experience. Underneath the surface of the contemporary world of Pokémon, The Cosby Show and hospital cubicles, the reader is drawn into a dreamscape of creeks and bogs, a fiery meadow and the guts of the sea. A blindman circles a Minotaur; a black horse rides through the pages. As the reader finds handholds within Morton’s poems, they may trace a dislocation between the voices here and the worlds into which they’re thrown - a strangely askew New Zealand, a mythological America, in liminal spaces where identity and meaning become blurred and uncertain. Jammed full of want, need, despair, love and politics, these are poems of archaeology and identity - where will we dig for our selves? By what names are we called? By whom are we known? This is darkly funny, unsettling writing that strips all the meat from the bones, ‘always writing the same story’.