A bathful of kawakawa and hot water / Hana Pera Aoake

Praise

Hybrid in form and theme, what cyborg melts hierarchies, what cyborg turns the gender binary to dust, what cyborg fights for our mana motuhake? This one! Read this book and then do something about it.

—essa may ranapiri

Writing with radical tenderness, with beauty and pain and precision, Hana Pera Aoake envisions an anticapitalist, de-colonial, Indigenous way of living and being, transcending the borders of poetry and prose in a style similar to that of Claudia Rankine and Layli Long Soldier. A bathful of kawakawa and hot water is an essential poetic text in the literature of Aotearoa, and a call to action at the end of the world.

—Nina Mingya Powles

Part memoir, part myth, part rant, part dream, part chant… This is an exciting and poignant book from one of my favourite NZ writers.

—Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

Hana Pera Aoake

(Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) Artist, poet, writer, and curator; author of A bathful of kawakawa and hot water (Compound Press, 2020) and Blame it on the rain (No More Poetry, 2025). Hana lives in Kawerau in the shadow of Pūtauaki maunga, and is a PhD candidate at Auckland University of Technology.