Meat Lovers
Rebecca Hawkes
April 2022
Softcover (210mm x 160mm)
92 pages
 
Meat Lovers is a book of poems on food, farming, and romantic folley, blending compassion and cruelty to explore the ordinary depravities of hunger and bloodlust.
 
‘Meat’ is a coming of age in which pony clubs, orphaned lambs and dairy-shed delirium are infused with playful menace and queer longings. Between bottle-fed care and killing-shed floors, the farm is a heady setting for love and death.
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In ‘Lovers’, the poet casts a wry eye over romance, from youthful sapphic infatuation to seething beastliness. Sentimental intensity is anchored by an introspective comic streak, in which ‘the stars are watching us / and boy howdy are they judgmental’.
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This collection of queasy hungers offers a feast of explosive mince & cheese pies, accusatory crackling, lab-grown meat and beetroot tempeh burger patties, all washed down with bloody milk or apple-mush moonshine. It teems with sensuous life, from domesticated beasts to the undulating mysteries of eels, as Hawkes explores uneasy relationships with our animals and with each other. 
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Tender and brutal, seductive and repulsive, Meat Lovers introduces a compelling new mode of hardcore pastoral.
 
Meat Lovers won Best International First Collection - The Laurel Prize 2022, and has been longlisted for The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards - Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.
 
Rebecca Hawkes is a queer Pākehā poet and painter. Find out more about her work by visiting her website, rebeccahawkesart.com
 
For each issue of Meat Lovers sold here, $8 stays with Wormhole and $17 goes to the author.
 
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