like visiting a New York cemetery in November
from “in the ocean. He was there, then he wasn’t—”
trees nearly bare, day overcast, ground frozen.
You walk through brown leaves, pick your way
to his plaque. Read his name, his dates, breathe.
He is here. He is not. Physical remnants under
the grass where you stand.
The Dancing Bicycle
by Jenna Heller
Available December 2025
ISBN: 978-1-0670252-0-5
paperback; 88 p.
135 mm x 216 mm
rrp: $25
From the USA to NZ, from four distinct seasons along the Connecticut River to the coastal wetlands of New Brighton, The Dancing Bicycle charts shifting landscapes of identity and inheritance, moving between worlds both familiar and far, bringing a searching intelligence and dry wit to the questions that face us all – what am I? Where do I belong? Who are my people? And “Hypnos/ son of night/[…] god of dreams,/tell me, asshole,/ why so elusive?”
Jenna Heller grew up in the United States, but has lived her entire adult life in Aotearoa New Zealand in Diamond Harbour, Banks Peninsula, and New Brighton, Christchurch. She was runner-up for the 2021 Caselberg International Poetry Prize, and has had poems shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Awards and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize. Her short fiction has won National Flash Fiction Day and the Australian CLA Best Prose Prize. The End of the Beginning, a collection of flash fiction, was published in 2024 by At the Bay | I te Kokoru. The Dancing Bicycle is her first collection of poetry.
you learn
from “Brother”
your history
by watching flax grow
and talking over
chocolate biscuits
with your sister
city lost
and reaching back
to Otaki and Omaio
These poems transport the reader from grief to love, from NZ to the USA, and from the windswept coast to the molten core of the earth. It’s a dazzling, ambitious and heartfelt first collection.
– OSCAR UPPERTON
O calm
from “Shattered”
and gentle
Hypnos
son of night
and darkness
father of the winged
god of dreams,
tell me, asshole,
why so elusive?
In these lovely, deeply felt poems, by turns elegiac and hopeful, what strikes me is how attuned Jenna Heller’s ear is to sound and syntax, the push and pull of rhythm, and how carefully the poet’s eye engages the wonderfully precise image, the resonant specific –“the sun-faded cardigan hanging still / on the coat rail” in order, as she puts it, “to expose the cracks” yet still invite “a chance for forgiveness.”
– BRYAN WALPERT
you stand next to me
from “Woman”
and all I can smell is you
sweet bittersweet
dusting your upper lip
and dancing in your palm
“a simple deep-seated desire
in a maze of possibilities”
“a bustling collection
of currents and rips” ….
This work by Jenna Heller is generous and vivid, sensory and soulful, restless and capacious: a compilation that both scoops deep from the well of memory and nets the too-fleeting present. It offers to quench the reader’s thirst for connection, pattern, variation, image, meditation, and much more. It’s a book to put at the top of your backpack, travel case or picnic basket this summer: for it contains poems to suit, soothe and complement every kind of mind weather.
– EMMA NEALE
Available wherever good books are sold, or direct from SVP by clicking below:
Sudden Valley Press 