On Thursday 14 November, we launched Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, the stunning new collection by Ōtepoti poet and writer, Emma Neale. We were hosted by the wonderful University Books Shop and joined by family and friends to welcome this new collection into the world. Louise Wallace was unfortunately sick on the evening of the launch, but Lynley Edmeades read her wonderful launch speech on the night. Here's what Louise wrote for Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit:
I’m so sorry to not be here tonight with you all, especially because there is so much to be celebrated about the wonderful Emma Neale and her tantalising new collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit.
To start with, I would have hoped to draw your attention to the ‘also published by Emma Neale’ page, when you open this new book. Emma is absolutely prolific – novels, poetry, short stories – she can do it all. This is her seventh collection of poems. Emma is a diligent and scrupulous writer and that is evident in the notes section of this new collection – the poems have sprung from so many different places.
Fibs, untruths, myths, magic and tricks. Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit is built on such a tantalising foundation. And there is certainly some lip-licking here. Lies like talismans – glistening – lies to lust over. But when asked to spin the spotlight around to focus on yourself, as this collection does, the prospect quickly becomes terrifying.
‘Let me here confess the worst deception I ever committed’ Emma writes in the poem ‘Mask’. Could we all do the same? There is a bravery to these poems, a fearlessness, an immense generosity to the reader. Emma brings her powerful lens onto our shame and hurt – fears, trauma, things that can’t easily be dislodged. She is willing to unpack them and hold them up to the light. There is a rawness in these poems, a fresh wound as each memory opens, where it would be easier to look away – and Emma asks us to bear witness, just as she does. This takes practice. It takes strength.
Emma has an empathetic intelligence that is evident in this work. The poems in Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit look beyond the surface. They are interested in what drives things – the why, the how. So, there are explorations but there are also straight-up punches: great pain bound up in deep love. Heartbreak repeats, ghostlike – unstoppable, like grain spilling from a sack. Searing truths crash in like waves. What keeps us safe is Emma’s moral compass and her vulnerability on the page. Emma’s nature is that no-one will be left behind – everyone has the chance to be seen, their pain and losses acknowledged here.
Lies are laid bare, bitches called out. Memories exposed for their inaccuracies. We are also witness to a poet in full possession of their powers. In ‘Pandora First Gets Feminism, Age Ten’ photo spreads in illicit magazines show ‘women stretched out like languid cats or skinny rotisserie chickens’ and I doubt I’ll ever read such a line again. At times, Emma builds an exhilarating sense of tension: ‘the knife that whets and whets’ she writes in ‘Threat’, ‘a red grenade of fear’. There is a growing sense of danger and by the time we smell smoke it’s too late – sexual and gendered violence, climate change, evasions, deceptions, history’s omissions, the world we are leaving for our children. Moments of shock and disgust. Sly, slippery behaviour. Bear witness, this book says.
Somehow, somehow, Emma also draws out hope. ‘first we do this loop & then we do this one too’ a mother hums gently to her child in ‘&’. But of course, Emma gets closer to the truth than that, and manages to reach out her fingers towards love’s complex burning core, in moments like this great scene on parenthood in ‘Found’:
as when my own sons made day break
with the red-hot radicles of their spines
that shed me – peach flesh parted on stone,
agate cored with fire – as together we strove
for them both to enter
the shape and light of their names
that seem to open now
in love’s translations
for keep, for found.
How lucky any of us are to receive or have received an unconditional love. To be able to give it. And Emma tells us that its these acts of love we are able to believe in. If anything, Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit is a book about the importance of expressing our feelings whenever we have that chance – as Emma writes, ‘what our bodies go on wanting and wanting to say’.
Thank you, Emma, for your thoughtfulness in this wonderful new collection. I encourage everyone to buy a copy and read it.
Photos by Lee Slater: bennettandslater.co.nz
Find out more about Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit.