Q&A: Rebecca Hawkes
Author photo by Ebony Lamb
Meat Lovers, the debut poetry collection by Rebecca Hawkes, is one of the books we’re most pumped about this year. Our Freya is even quoted on the back cover: “Rebecca Hawkes is the unmatched empress of viscera. Thrillingly perverse, utterly compelling – you eat these poems like overripe peaches, or like your own tongue.” Rebecca answers our quick Q&A.
1. How are you and what have you been up to lately?
I am an agent of chaos!!!!!!!! This year is (gladly) hectic - Meat Lovers is out and AUP are also releasing No Other Place to Stand soon, the anthology of climate change poetry which has been a three-year editorial project for Jordan [Hamel], Erik [Kennedy], Essa [Ranapiri] and me ... and all four of us all also happen to have our own solo books coming out this year because poetry arrives in its own sweet time, which is sometimes all at once in a global pandemic.
Meanwhile I'm prepping for Show Ponies at the Brisbane Writers' Festival in May (the 'ornamental' swords I recently obtained for the gig probably won't get through customs tho), the Lōemis art show in June (which means finding time to paint again), and Nikki-Lee [Birdsey] and I are gearing up to start reading submissions for the next issue of Sweet Mammalian.
Don’t even start me on my primary job, which takes up most of my waking brain-hours... I may pretend to be a bohemian rascal but really I'm just another scurrying office damsel clutching my lanyard on Lambton Quay.
2. If you were working in a bookshop, how would you hand-sell your book to customers? What would you say to convince them to buy and read it?
Did you think you might be a teen werewolf, and then realise you were just bisexual?
Are you a big fan of the Peach Teats billboard?
Have you ever been so in love it transmuted into something more like obsessive contempt?
Does the phrase “you are what you eat” induce a mild existential crisis?
Did you grow up on a farm and end up confronted by the fact that your townie friends at school did not have a dedicated killing shed in the back garden?
Would romance be easier if you could simply transform into a praying mantis?
Do you have opinions on the future of agriculture in this country but wish the Big Dairy discourse was way ..... hornier?
If you answered "yes", "no", "maybe", or "I don't know, could you repeat that question?", you may be entitled to a slice of Meat Lovers.
3. What books (or other art/media) influenced you while writing this book, or generally in your life?
Living in Wellington I am steeped in poetry always, because poets (and novelists who have been subsumed by the poetry community, sorry Rose and Razz) are my entire social life aside from Dungeons & Dragons. If I name everyone we’ll be here all day but my poems would be nothing without the friends I’m scribbling my little jokes for.
In writing the ‘Meat’ half of the book, I was touched by books like Marty Smith's Horse With Hat and Janet Newman's Unseasoned Campaigner - both collections deal more wisely than mine with the roughness of farming life. And books like Tayi Tibble’s Rangikura and Joan Fleming's Failed Love Poems influenced the bittersweet escapades of the ‘Lovers’ half of the book – I love love poetry, but even better when romance keeps some sneaky razorblades in its candyfloss, and reveals characters at their most humanly unhinged.
4. What good books have you read lately?
I’ve been admiring the deft handiwork of Oscar Upperton's The Surgeon's Brain and Chris Tse’s Super Model Minority in all its pride/rage/sweat/glitter. I also just devoured Song of Less by Joan Fleming – a haunting chorus in a scorched-earth dystopia – and Chris Holdaway’s Gorse Poems, relentlessly generative as its namesake weed.
Buy Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press), $25
