On the evening of Thursday 13 March, we launched Janet Charman's new collection, The Intimacy Bus. With friends and family, we launched this new collection into the world at the wonderful Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby, Auckland. A huge thank you to Carole, Tanya and the rest of the team at The Women's Bookshop, and thank you to everyone who came to help us celebrate.
OUP publisher, Sue Wootton was there to launch the collection for us. Here is an extract from her speech:
'What a privilege it is to be Janet’s publisher and to have the honour of launching her tenth collection this evening. Janet’s previous collection The Pistils was the very first manuscript that I accepted, shortly after I first stepped 
into this role in 2021. The cover image of The Pistils (great title) featured a flower flaunting its female sexual organs on a black cover, and the blackness, with its intimations of mourning and night was appropriate. Four years on, here we are with The Intimacy Bus – another wonderfully evocative title. As you can see instantly from the cover, the poems in this collection – while no less steeped in grief – have been generated from a different kind of energy - make of this glowing ember red what you will.'
'This collection is political – of course it is – and it's personal – of course it is. No one in NZ literature blends those two aspects of the lived life as well as Janet does, directly and without compromise, yet with a remarkable delicacy born of an apparently effortless ability to distil language to its essential filaments and 
musical cadences. This is tender, compassionate work, but – witness the glowing cover – it is hot. It is tough, sexy, sensual, passionate, wicked, hilarious, courageous, moving and powerful.'
Find out more about The Intimacy Bus here.
You can also listen to this great review from Harry Ricketts on Nine to Noon RNZ here.