Q1: Tell us about how all souls came to be the title of the 2026 edition.
It’s often striking how a shared compulsion surges to the surface within each year’s submissions, and this year it was instantly clear how gripped the poets were with existential questions. Issues of soul, meaning, human essence and universal source were a constant and searching presence. The god-shaped hole was howling!
Q2: This issue marks a bit of a milestone, being 75 years since Louis Johnson sent the very first edition of the Yearbook out into the world. How much of a sense of this legacy presses on you as the current editor?
It’s such an immense trust to carry! Poetry New Zealand was one of the first outlets for my own early poems, so I know firsthand how crucial it can be in sustaining emerging writers. To think of all the voices that this journal has nurtured over 75 years is intense — and each edition brings a gallery of dazzling new voices to the fore as well.
Q3: The featured poet for the 2025 edition is Josiah Morgan. Tell us about him and his work.
Josiah’s writing has been knocking me out since I first saw it in the Mayhem submissions pile. His poems speed the reader straight to the living edge, with such fearlessness and force. His Dead Bird Books debut i’m still growing was one of the most explosive volumes this country’s ever seen! So I’m thrilled to be able to showcase fresh poems from this ferocious talent.
Q4: What’s the Morgan poem in this Yearbook that you find the most compelling, and why?
‘Family Secret’ is a stunning crystallisation of how redactions operate in the whole sequence, their ‘black windows’ shattering the page with ‘the weight of what was done’ — every time I read it I find it devastating.
Q5: Great things lie ahead for him, do you predict?
Absolutely — I don’t think there’s a limit for what a voice like this can do! Its reach is stratospheric. And the issues it speaks to are so urgent.
Q6: Who are you pleased to see back in the Yearbook after a bit of an absence?
That’s a tough question because every voice that features holds its own joy for me — but this year it felt especially joyous to have work from Rebecca Hawkes, Jordan Hamel, Richard Reeve and Alice Miller included once again.
Q7: There are 29 reviews this year, which is very generous coverage. How would you describe the poetry volume reviewer’s art?
One of the things I love the most about our reviewing section is the sense of poets in direct, open, intimate dialogue with each other. I try to match each volume for review with a poet who can connect in depth — and the genuine, detailed, vital, intensive explorations which arise are things of beauty, which help build a sense of community. They’re often as rich to read as the poems themselves!
Q8: As per the last few years, the three winners of the Yearbook’s schools’ competition, which you judge, rub shoulders here with seasoned practitioners. What strikes you about these poems from young people who are only Year 11, 12 and 13 this time round?
The winning poems really vibrated with energy, and I was blown away at these young poets’ ability to transport the reader via sharp sensory detail, resonant sound-choices and tight control of tone. Such accomplished work from such early writers is so exciting to see — and the aliveness of the high school entries overall is always utterly inspiring!
Q9: We have asked you this before but it’s a good question so we will ask it again: if there was an award for the most bewitchingly titled poem in this collection, to which poet would it go?
Yeah, this is something like an annual award now! This year it has to go to Devon Webb’s piece ‘// The vision of you tapping away at a typewriter with a cigarette hanging from your lips wearing one of your cunty little tanktops has me feeling like God isn’t dead //’. What a killer lead-in!
Q10: If there is a compulsion in New Zealand poets, is it good for another 75 years do you think?
The red-hot, trailblazing, ultra-charged poetry that pours into me each year shows zero signs of dying out! I have no doubt it’ll keep burning fierce — and it’s a vast honour to be here to mark 75 years of sharing its wild light.
