show you're working out

Dead Bird Books, 2025

https://www.deadbirdbooks.com/shop/p/show-youre-working-out

What do you get if you cross Pākehā stories from the rural south of Te Waipounamu with scissors, glue and a want to reveal structural and personal violences of settler colonisation? It’s not a joke but some parts of liz breslin’s third full length collection, show you’re working out, are funny.

The play on ‘your’/’you’re’ destabilises a singular sense of story - showing that you’re working out is what it can feel important to do in a relationship, or a small community, when you want to be accepted. And ‘show your working out’ is what maths exams at school sometimes say. Put marks on the page to signify the thinking that you have done.

liz’s experimental and engaging marks on the pages of this collection include poems about complicity, crocs, cycling, DIY, domestic abuse, the queerness of hands, Pride, Pilates, needlework, what gets called nature, reality tv, scissoring, sharks, Sharon from the Speight’s ads, wellness culture and white supremacy.

Breslin’s commitment to social justice emerges not just in her themes but in her poetic practice: inclusive, intersectional, unafraid. Her poetry does not seek comfort; it seeks truth, transformation, and the radical act of witness. In this current moment of a world on fire, Liz Breslin writes poetry as a reckoning. − Jeanette Wikaira, Chair, Hone Tuwhare Trust and Chair, Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival, Author/editor of Books of Mana

To read this book is to cycle through the Aotearoa countryside queering its ruggedness and unsettling its colonial dream/hellscape. I consider myself lucky to write in Aotearoa where I can learn from someone who lives poetry in the way Breslin does. All the detritus of life is repurposed in the DIY building hands of this poet. As I put this book down, I carry its winding corridors within me disoriented, bewildered enough to face the news and carry on. − Rushi Vyas, Author of When I Reach For Your Pulse and Between Us, Not Half a Saint (with Rajiv Mohabir)

These fresh, zingy poems are not afraid of the dark. They structurally reinvent the poetic form, reminding us that we too can change up our lives. Liz Breslin’s writing grapples through the mountains, and finds a way out to the sea. − Jo Randerson, Barbarian Productions

Breslin is a former poetry slam champion, and she brings the immediacy and intensity of performance to the page, while the skill and intricacy of these poems keeps you returning to them. These poems are shaped and sculpted. They carve the page in interesting ways. Her deft stitching together of lesbian scissoring memes via TikTok with the nineteenth century workbasket, is alone worth the price of admission. YOU SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK! −Alison Glenny, Author of /slanted, Bird Collector and The Farewell Tourist

in bed with the feminists

Dead Bird Books, 2021

https://www.deadbirdbooks.com/shop/p/inbedwiththefeminists

In these poems, Liz Breslin traces her own truths through Siri, Cixous, supermarkets, spin cycles, pillow gaps facing away from the door and kissing with tongues at the traffic lights. Excavating feminism, mothering and queerness, she writhes into unexamined spaces, using form to play her way. She writes for the ear, for the page, for the body and mind. These are poems you’ll want to get in and out of bed with.  

This is Liz Breslin’s second poem collection, part of which won the 2020 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. Her first collection, Alzheimer’s and a spoon, was listed as one in the NZ Listener’s Top 100 Books of 2017. Liz was a virtual resident at the National Centre for Writing, UK, in February 2021, where she documented life through the peregrine webcam on Norwich Cathedral in a collection called Nothing to see here. In April 2020 she co-created The Possibilities Project with Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature.

Alzheimer's and a spoon

Otago University press, 2017

when life gives you spoons, demand a refund, an inquiry

when life gives you spoons, scoop the innards, carve a heart

when life gives you spoons, collect a set

Alzheimer’s and a Spoon takes its readers on a tangled trip. Public stories – a conversation at the Castle of the Insane, online quizzes to determine if you’re mostly meercat or Hufflepuff. #stainlessteelkudos. Personal tales, of Liz’s babcia, a devout Catholic and a soldier in the Warsaw Uprising, who spent her last years with Alzheimer’s disease. There is much to remember that she so badly wanted to forget. What do you do when life gives you spoons?

To find this kind of sheer brio and linguistic flair in New Zealand writing, one inevitably goes back to Janet Frame. – Vincent O’Sullivan