Glass Rooster: Paperback - Tapa blanda

The poems in The Glass Rooster explore the spaces inhabited by humans and other creatures - not just natural ecosystems like deserts or the alpine zone, but cities and outer space. Our guide on this journey is a glass rooster - observer of stars and lover of hens - who first popped up in Janis Freegard's poetry years ago and wanders unchecked through the book. These are searching, remarkable poems - about art, about places, about unusual expeditions, and about love. Each of the eight sections (or `echo-systems') in the book - The Damp Places, Forest, Cityscape, The Alpine Zone, Space, Home & Garden, Underground and In the Desert - is introduced by a triolet, a French poetic form with repeated lines. Other poems are arranged in pairs, each echoing something about the other, whether desert plants, the presence of balloons or the dangers of working in a mine. The result is a tremendous, riotous exploration of an interconnected world.

Janis Freegard lives in Wellington, New Zealand, with an historian and a cat, and works in the public service. Her first full-length poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, was published by Auckland University Press in 2011. She is also the author of a chapbook, The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider (Anomalous Press, 2013), and co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (AUP, 2008). Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas, including Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page (Random House, 2014), Best NZ Poems 2012 and Landfall. In 2014 she held the inaugural Ema Saik? Poetry Fellowship at New Pacific Studio in the Wairarapa. She also writes fiction, is a past winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award, and will publish her first novel, with M?karo Press, in May 2015.