Please join me to celebrate the launch of my debut collection of poetry, The Dancing Bicycle, published by Sudden Valley Press. This event will feature readings from me, along with special guests and acclaimed local poets ERIK KENNEDY and GAIL INGRAM.
All welcome, light refreshments provided. Free event.
Doors open at 6:00 pm for a 6:30 pm start. Free street parking after 6:00 pm.
There will be books for sale on the night for $25.00.
ABOUT THE BOOK
“These poems transport the reader from grief to love, from NZ to the USA, and from the windswept coast to the molten core of the earth. It’s a dazzling, ambitious and heartfelt first collection.” – OSCAR UPPERTON
“This work by Jenna Heller is generous and vivid, sensory and soulful, restless and capacious: a compilation that both scoops deep from the well of memory and nets the too-fleeting present. It offers to quench the reader’s thirst for connection, pattern, variation, image, meditation, and much more. It’s a book to put at the top of your backpack, travel case or picnic basket: for it contains poems to suit, soothe and complement every kind of mind weather.” – EMMA NEALE
“In these lovely, deeply felt poems, by turns elegiac and hopeful, what strikes me is how attuned Jenna Heller’s ear is to sound and syntax, the push and pull of rhythm, and how carefully the poet’s eye engages the wonderfully precise image, the resonant specific – ‘the sun-faded cardigan hanging still / on the coat rail’ in order, as she puts it, ‘to expose the cracks’ yet still invite ‘a chance for forgiveness.’” – BRYAN WALPERT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenna Heller grew up in the United States, but has lived her entire adult life in Aotearoa New Zealand in Diamond Harbour, Banks Peninsula, and New Brighton, Christchurch. She was runner-up for the 2021 Caselberg International Poetry Prize, and has had poems shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Awards and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize. Her short fiction has won National Flash Fiction Day and the Australian CLA Best Prose Prize. The End of the Beginning, a collection of flash fiction, was published in 2024 by At the Bay | I te Kokoru. The Dancing Bicycle is her first collection of poetry.
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