Poetry Live! Presents Helen Rickerby - May 12

7:30pm Tuesday 12 May at Cafe 39, 39 Ponsonby Rd

Guest poet: Helen Rickerby

Guest musician: TBC

Emcee: Mikey Lim

Open Mic: you! First time readers warmly welcome. Sign up on the night. 5 mins max.

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/