Middle Youth
Published in August 2023 by Te Herenga Waka University Press
The poems of Middle Youth look directly into the fire. Sometimes they find joy and the possibility of sustaining oneself; sometimes they feel the sense of an ending.
Morgan Bach writes with a dark, crackling energy and controlled rage about the world we find ourselves in. Here are the loves that fill and drain us, tarot readings under a roof weighted with snow, and a body that keeps on moving though it feels like a full stop. Here is the usefulness of hope, even a secret one.
Reviews for Middle Youth
Truly beautiful.’ —Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times
‘These poems are bitter as a herbal tonic and salty as the sea itself. They are bloody and brutal and aware of the strange rhythms of their own heartbeat.’ —Hannah Mettner, author of Saga and Fully Clothed and So Forgetful
‘In Middle Youth, Bach explores moving away from youth into an uncertain, climate-stalked future. I love the “trap” poems. I resolve to tread lightly.’ —James Brown, the Modern Letters newsletter
‘Morgan Bach does us a huge service with this frank expression of her vision. We need more of such unvarnished truth-telling.’ —Margaret Austin, Regional News
‘Often a sequence of sorrow and hesitation, Middle Youth is carefully crafted and does open up to us a certain perspective that is rarely revealed.’ —NZ Listener
‘Who wants to be hot / on a doomed planet? Morgan Bach bathes the ending generations in forest fire radiance, partying contagiously on the edge of the extinction event where we become brittle stars unable to tell the quaking earth from our shaky hearts. Middle Youth looks out from this faded blue dot and its leaky seed banks to other love-struck planets, and inward to birthdays nobody quite expected to celebrate as the years stretch and flee in every direction.’ —Rebecca Hawkes, author of Meatlovers. Read Rebecca’s launch speech for the Middle Youth and Saga double launch here.
‘Middle Youth is poetry at its skin tearing, provoking out of slumber, flame sparking best.’ —Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf
‘Bach’s bodily symbolism conveys her generation’s inheritance of and frustration at an increasingly damaged ecosystem that increasingly risks damaging us. Consequently, the resonant imagistic conjuring of the world in the poem “the pomegranate” as “an open-air museum / where everyone is relaxing / into their graves” mutates into “a forest of glass” in the poem “blood moon”. Throughout, these recurring intimations of planetary vulnerability resulting from human interactions are juxtaposed with authorial meditations upon light and air as physical and responsive, but also as disregarded and endangered resources.’ —Siobhan Harvey, Landfall Review Online
Some of us eat the seeds
Published in July 2015 by Te Herenga Waka University Press
Morgan Bach weaves a line between waking life and the unstable dreamworld beneath, disorienting and reorienting us from moment to moment. In poems of childhood, family, travel and relationships, she responds to the ache and sometimes horror of life in a voice that is restless and witty, bold and sharp-edged.
Read the launch speech by Ashleigh Young for Some of us eat the seeds here.
Reviews for Some of us eat the seeds
Reviewed by Paula Green for The Poetry Shelf ”Reading Morgan’s debut is utterly rewarding as it sets every part of your readerly self on high alert, every bit paying attention to the pulse of the poem, each poem needing the grit of daily life, the surprise and flight of a daring mind, the traces of real life, the miniature stories, the lines that move in the ear so beautifully. Ordinary, extraordinary and yes, astonishing.”.
Reviewed by Anna Forsyth for The Reader.
Listen to Greg O’Brien review Some of us eat the seeds on Radio New Zealand.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Coleman in Takahe: ‘the poems are light and recognisable, also deep and extraordinary… On the back cover, poet Bernadette Hall writes that this book is “ordinary and extraordinary. It’s the kind of arrival that delights me.” Me too – Some of Us Eat the Seeds is thoroughly gratifying.’
Selected for the NZ Listener top poetry highlights of the year (2015), by Mark Broach – ‘An impressive debut.’
David Eggleton picked the book in his choices of the year (2015): ‘I was also very taken by the skewed reminiscences in Morgan Bach‘s first collection Some of us eat the seeds (Victoria University Press). Spiky, terse, yet also lyrical and tonally subtle, they recount a sense of adolescent awkwardness and estrangement, almost as if at times she’s ogling the outside world and its emotional coldness from her own private igloo, growing up in small town provincial New Zealand and longing to be elsewhere.’
Morgan Bach 