Cadence Chung
Out 10 April 2025
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 Whitcoulls 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: 88 pages
Categories: Poetry
ISBN: 9781991348043
RRP: $30
Release date: 10 April 2025
Available for pre-order