Tayi Tibble’s second book of poetry, Rangikura (Knopf), is an extraordinarily fresh collection from a young indigenous writer whose language captures the power of the intersections of Māori culture, family history, and her personal inquisitions of love, colonization, and tradition. From Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa, near New Zealand, Tibble pulls from her heritage and pop culture with razor-sharp language, wit, and an abundance of curiosity with a beautiful kind of metaphoric wreckage in her writing that reminds you just what it is to be alive in a world full of walking ghosts.
In the opening poem, “Mahuka,” Tibble writes: “I love words so much they blind me./I’m always speeding/recklessly with star prints burning up/in my irises. I don’t mean to/start so many fires/but I’ve spent my whole life tensing up/waiting for the collision.” These poems are at once raw and full of feminist fire, recounting ancestral and generational pain and promise, and coming into an understanding and definition of who you are and how you belong—on your own terms.
In that same poem, Tibble also writes: “I’m the off-cast of half-castes/so I’ve always had visions/of myself in a thousand pieces.” These thousands of pieces are what paint us, the reader, a bigger picture of this budding voice in full-throated verse, and our eyes and hearts are all the better for it.
