Bringing the dance floor to the poetry book: Sylvan Spring’s Killer Rack

Poetry and music at their best share a trick: the ability to be both celestial and grounded; dealing with the particulars of our lives, yet moving into abstraction. They can be at once very personal to their writers, but also build community.  This is certainly true of Te Whanganui-a-Tara poet Sylvan Spring’s first book Killer Rack, recently published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. As novelist Pip Adam writes on the back cover, Killer Rack is “somehow intimate and communal in the same breath, and wild and compassionate”