Helen Rickerby
Tue, 12 May
|Cafe 39
Poetry Live presents guest poet Helen Rickerby


Time & Location
12 May 2026, 7:30 pm – 11:00 pm
Cafe 39, 39 Ponsonby Road, Ponsonby, Auckland 1011, New Zealand
About the event
Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She has published five and a half collections of poetry, including the just-published My Bourgeois Apocalypse (Auckland University Press, 2026), a poetic collage-essay-memoir crafted out of (mostly) randomly selected sentences from her journals. Her previous collection, How to Live (AUP, 2019), won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Helen has a particular interest in what happens when poetry meets other forms, and in the possibilities of fragmented hybrid forms. She’s co-organised poetry conferences and literary events, and single-handedly ran Seraph Press – a boutique but significant publisher of New Zealand poetry. She earns a crust as an editor and technical writer.
There's a bit more about the new book here: https://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/my-bourgeois-apocalypse/
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