Sudden Valley Press

Scared together we carried our babies
high in the Countdown carpark. It is only natural,
all of it, says my mother-in-law, from the seat of
the river. It’s far out here, this bight. Don’t forget
how when Dad and Uncle Sam dug the well out
back, they finished it, you know, with dynamite.

Megan Clayton is a writer and performer from Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Dynamite, her debut poetry collection, won the 2026 John O’Connor First
Book Award with Sudden Valley Press. Megan’s writing has been published
in journals and collections in Aotearoa and Australia, including takahē,
The Spinoff, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Cordite Poetry Review. After
completing a PhD in the poetics of Robin Hyde (University of Canterbury,
2002), Megan has worked in higher education ever since. On the Ōtautahi
live poetry circuit she is a feature poet and open mic regular.

Raised in Ōtautahi where her own family now lives, Megan writes a city
shaped by geology, loss and human struggle, making sense of family, feeling
and memory. In Dynamite, the city’s outer suburbs and their histories find
their place. Wetlands return to the coast; an unchaperoned couple explores
the city by bicycle; meetings are interrupted by a horse offering rescue.
Warm, wry and generous, Dynamite supports, challenges and surprises.

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“Megan Clayton doesn’t put a foot wrong as she treks across the
potentially tricky territories of history and belonging, origins and names.
She doesn’t stumble when grief is called for—she interleaves a sequence
of elegies that will make you cry. This is a debut that shows us a new
artist emerging fully formed.
ERIK KENNEDY

Megan Clayton’s Dynamite is exactly that. This is a collection of
sophisticated ideas embedded in tightly constructed form. Dynamite
introduces the rest of Aotearoa of one of Ōtautahi’s most significant
poets – Clayton’s intelligence and indexical mind collects reference
points both intellectual, historical and kitsch, blending poetic discourse
into something distinct, place-specific, and engaged with the history
of both international, national and local poetics. “This is ordinary
wisdom,” Clayton writes in Umbrella (my hair, 2), one of many
wonderful, clearly-expressed lines in a collection that is anything but
ordinary in the wisdom it imparts. Clayton’s speakers often utilise
language in a direct way, but the poems themselves are like icebergs,
with much to unpack beneath the surface – in these poems language is
at times a provocation, at times a charm, at times a joke; always deeply
considered.
JOSIAH MORGAN

With a backstory-o-meter, and a hand on the gilt windowsill behind the
greasy dishes pile, Clayton floats benedictions as rafts to the sodden.
Thin skin, emptied spaces, and fidgety beloveds (and selves) are not
fixed, but held. This collection peers with sage eyes at what gets made
daily in the image of what we wish for, and at who we might as well go
ahead and be.
LEE FRASER

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