The Tuesday Poem

This week we have a guest editor of the Tuesday Poem, Tulia Thompson, who has chosen a poem from Leilani Tamu's recent collection The Art of Excavation, which 'seeks to reframe the Pacific from the colonial, exotifying gaze of the West': 

http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/2015/04/aotearoa-runaway-by-leilani-tamu.html.

 'Aotearoa Runaway' is powerful and challenging. 

I was going to describe it as telling the experience of a 'teen gone wild', but that felt reductive - it's much more than that, much richer. I was fortunate enough to hear Leilani read this poem at a conference last year, and there was hardly a dry eye in the room when she had finished (which is not quite what you expect at an academic conference, but was wonderful).