Cadence Chung
Saturday nights at the cocktail bar, Jackson and I
talk about history books. As if we’ll have any say in it at all.
– from ‘Curtain’
In Mad Diva, poet Cadence Chung takes us wheeling and diving through a scintillating whirl of ideas, experiences and imagery. Operatic in scale, by turns lush and spare, Mad Diva is a high-wire performance from an extraordinary emerging talent. This beautifully crafted collection confronts the chaos of life full on. The gorgeous jostles up against the grotesque. Romance and glamour have equal billing with the blood-streaked and the gritty. Scheherazade shares the back seat of a Wellington Uber; Samson’s in the bathroom getting a shave; Leilah on a plastic stage considers the history of ‘Chinamen on display’; Carmen suffers a real-life stab wound and sings the Habanera like a bat out of hell. Bejewelled, perfumed, mascaraed, satin-and-silked and never shy to be brazen or camp, the ever-unravelling divas in these poems are not interested in staying within assigned categories. In opera houses, art galleries, dive bars, bedrooms; in the purple light of Farmers at dusk and in Wakefield Street at midnight, they keep on aiming for their high Cs, keep on testing the world for meaning, acceptance and love.
‘Brilliant in so many ways …This diva pulls you along in their twirling wake.’ – Anne Kennedy
Author
Cadence Chung (she/they) is a poet, classical singer, and composer. She performs as a classical soloist and is a presenter on RNZ Concert. In 2023, she was named an Emerging Practitioner by the Fund for Acting and Musical Endeavours. Her poems have been published in Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Newsroom, Pantograph Punch, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, takahē, The Spinoff and Turbine / Kapohau. Her best-selling chapbook, anomalia, was released in 2022. She's also the producer and editor of Mythos: an Audio-Visual Anthology of Art by Young New Zealanders, released in 2024. Mad Diva is her first full-length collection of poetry.
Publication details
Format: Paperback
Dimensions: 230 x 150mm
Pages: 83 pages
Categories: Poetry
ISBN: 9781991348043
RRP: $30
Release date: 8 April 2025
Available for pre-order
Reviews and Interviews
A brand new poetry collection from maverick musician and writer, Cadence Chung.
Mad Diva on the Unity Books Wellington Bestseller list for the week ending 11 April Read
As per a friend's recommendation, I'm reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf. The little blue copy he lent me is always lurking in my backpacks and handbags, and I normally pull it out when I'm on the bus. Woolf is always a difficult but rewarding read. I first read Orlando when I was in high school, and as a young queer poet I was absolutely obsessed ... I'm also reading Issue 19 of Starling Magazine. Starling was one of the first magazines I was published in, and my poetry career really grew ever since I first appeared in it as a little Year 10. I think it's such a vital venture and I always find it exciting to see the line-up.
Cadence Chung speaks to Sapeer Mayron for The Sunday Star Times Read
It’s taken into account a lot of inspirations from all of the different genres I work within ... I was especially inspired by my studies in English Literature and music, all of these divas or ‘crazy women’ throughout history that have often been portrayed in a negative light, when really they often haven’t done that much wrong, or the sort of ‘wrongs’ that are portrayed because they’re just strong women expressing their desires ... A lot of poems in the collection are named after favourite divas in the canon.
Cadence Chung speaks to Amy Delahunty for In the Neighbourhood Wellington Access Radio 106.1 FM Listen
I always feel like I conceive of a book as a chance to do something really interesting and something out of the ordinary, and to really cultivate a voice that you might not get a chance to when you’re writing a whole bunch of little poems ... I could play around with these larger-than-life characters and concepts while also bringing them into the real world, entwining these dramatic, theatrical, musical, poetical worlds into our own in a way that you don’t often get the time to in shorter works.
Cadence Chung speaks to Jeff Harford for Write Spot, OAR FM with the Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature Listen
I’m always writing. I write a lot and then hone it down. What gets published is a tiny fraction of what I actually write. I’m always writing on buses, in lectures – whenever I get the inspiration. But a lot of the time it’s inspired by what I’m reading or watching or listening to, even if I don’t quite realise it at the time. All of that builds up in my subconscious, and then when I write a poem, I find it’s often inspired by those things, which I think comes out a lot in Mad Diva. With my studies in English Literature and music there’s a lot of those sorts of concepts and figures and stories appearing in my poems.
Cadence Chung speaks to Beth Torrance-Hetherington for Various Artists, 95bFM Listen