A must- read if you want to visit Aotearoa New Zealand. Or if you simply want to challenge your perspective and broaden your your horizons and check your privilege. Of if you interested in how language shapes culture, community, thinking. Or how colonialism and racism shapes Aotearoas history and present. Or if you want to read a book full of splendid short essays. “The predominant western conceptualisation of the world as being based on capital and neoliberal ideology is only one way of structuring our societies. Indigenous traditions remind us that there are numerous other options, other possibilities of working together, of organizing and understanding the world we live in, that when you regard your very home as part of the natural world around you, global destruction is not inevitable.” “Metaphors. Discreet and gentle, overt and awesome, meanings rich with imagery: we are water, we are earth, we are air, we are everything. This is the essence of the wānanga, the deepest knowledge of te wā, totality of time and space, that we command with mana kapu, with the power of words.” “The feeling of my brain unfolding exponentially when I encounter an outstanding poem is the feeling of being woke. As a poet and a hungry reader of poetry, I find there is nothing that quite matches that moment when comprehension meets complexity meets cognitive dissonance and the whole lot gallops into the glorious sublime- taking me for a ride on the splendid and winged unimaginable.”