Current research projects

Experimental forms of life-writing: what does alphabeticisation do to the diary and the self-construction it presents; what happens if your literary criticism takes the form of a series of personal letters; what do you learn about yourself through a study of the colour blue; what if you aim every piece of writing, from any starting point, towards a feeling of shame?  This project – also a course I teach – looks at writers like Sheila Heti, Kim Adrian, Maggie Nelson, Brian Blanchfield, Robert Sullivan, Heather Christle, Anne Boyer and others to consider the effects of form on the presentation of the self.

Dictionaries of loss: a study of the ordering principle of the alphabet and other ways of working with the dictionary to manage and express ecological and personal losses and grief.

I am not currently taking on further supervisions. 

Recent critical work

Actions and Travels: How Poetry Works: a study of the range of ways poetry can resonate with readers, from the role simplicity can play to the pleasures of ornamentation, in poetry from Robert Frost to Jericho Brown, John Keats to essa may ranapiri.

As editor: AUP New Poets. These anthologies introduce the work of three emerging poets in each volume, each represented by a substantial selection of their work.

Recent creative work

Terrier Worrier: A poem in five parts (Auckland University Press, 2025) – a poem that is also a form of life-writing, a series of thoughts passing through my mind over five seasons, about whales, dreams, mortality, Instagram, language, sparrows and chickens. 

Terrier, Worrier

The Bedmaking Competition, a novella (Seizure Press, Sydney, 2018)

Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (Auckland University Press, 2018)

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