Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026
The New Townhouses, poems by Erik Kennedy.
The New Townhouses
The new townhouses hit 50 degrees inside
on 20 degree days. That’s hot enough to talk about
frying an egg on the floor while actually getting heatstroke.
What would you do with an egg
you fried on the floor anyway? A forlorn floor egg
with its memories of dust and dead skin?
The heatstroke is the more interesting problem.
The heatstroke is where the personal
meets the political, where thermoregulation
and building regulations are brought into the same space
and not let out—the issues are kept in by
big, unopenable floor-to-ceiling windows
that look clean and premium in the rendering
and really let you take advantage of the late light
that saturates this locale in summer. If you threw a brick
through the big window you’d be enacting individual change
and not system change, and you’re the kind of person
who, when presented with the facts, goes away to superintend
their life and then, in the middle of lunch or a conversation,
up and says: right, how many bricks and how many windows.
A Summer So Hot
It Makes You Suspicious of Everything
I was one of those children
who was never afraid of monsters,
just things like fire and war.
What did I know about fire?
Only what I had read—
that it consumes everything.
What did I know about war?
Again, only what I had read—
that it steals everything.
And what did I know about monsters?
I had heard from them before
in their own words,
and I wasn’t impressed.
© Erik Kennedy
Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like Anthropocene, berlin lit, Cordite, FENCE, Los Angeles Review of Books, PN Review, Poetry, The Poetry Review, Rabbit, Threepenny Review, and the TLS, as well as across New Zealand. He is the poetry editor of takahē and an adjunct fellow in English at the University of Canterbury. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.