It used to be my fantasy
from “Intravenous”
to nurse a hero back to health.
Insinuate myself into him via
a drip, spread through his veins
Tender Insurrections
Marisa Cappetta
Available from February 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7385824-3-3
paperback; 78 p.
rrp $25
A mother who may, or may not, be real. A father-figure grown in a green glass bottle. A house with its doors torn off. A pangolin of grief, a team of Rapunzels, a ritual boiling of sauerkraut and wedding photos.
Enter the strange, passionate, enigmatic world of Marisa Cappetta.
First her bedroom. Baba Yaga unhinges the door. Ashamed of her nakedness, the house
from “The house remembers the day Baba Yaga removes her doors”
ventures into the cavernous sewer pipes to examine her body in the puddles.
How appropriate for poet-jeweller-artist Marisa Cappetta to have given us this bijouterie of a book, with its sharp-edged, multi-faceted surrealism; intricate assemblage; and enough astonishing imagery to make your head spin. These finely-crafted poems are like no others currently being written in Aotearoa/New Zealand. With Tender Insurrections she has given us a book to savour and to treasure.
James Norcliffe
It glides on at twenty. With her
from “She wears her wedding ring so long the bone changes shape”
thumb she presses the band
against the underside of her finger
and makes a gap, a sliver of window
through which she views her future house
and the edge of the sea where children
run from the small surf.
These poems are ‘domestic’ but in the way that ‘home’, ‘mother’, ‘kitchen’, ‘bathroom’, ‘garden’ evoke the whole world, the universe of human experience, you, and me, as intimate associations. Marisa Cappetta is indeed an insurrectionist, assaulting us with an armoury of surprising images which blow open the mind-vault with soft explosions, like thistledown breaking free into the sky. From the moment of encountering in the first poem her mother ‘curled around herself, a pangolin of grief’, we know we are in the hands of a skilled maker and shapeshifter, a poet who also crafts visual images of jewellery, objects which likewise connect commonplace bibs and bobs with bright things. Be ready to be delighted, and astonished, and deeply touched.
John Allison
The making of wings
from “Wingmaker and daughter”
is a secret family business.
Father and daughter stretched
over a wire armature,
their future foretold
in the silk fibres
These poems are an invitation to enter a world attentive to the power of the elements. A quiet fire becomes a furnace of vital, unusual poems, that demand our close attention. Some are tender. Some are political. Some say, what have we done? They are at all times deftly handwoven, natural and crafted. They speak as one, in a distinct and confident voice. Under their wings and feathers, a real wordsmith is at work.
Kerrin P Sharpe
A vintage Webster’s Dictionary grants wishes:
from “Unruly collections”
croziers and comets, mushrooms and mustard.
Erotic pulp-fiction postcards are where I sin.
I pray at the shrine of Singer sewing-parts.
Creatures of hinges, cogs, pulleys and keys
mumble in corners.
All are still when I am in the room.
Marisa Cappetta’s first collection How to tour the world on a flying fox was published by Steele Roberts in 2016. In 2013 Cappetta received a mentorship from the New Zealand Society of Authors, with mentor James Norcliffe. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Hagley Writers’ Institute in 2011, winning the 2011 Margaret Mahy prize. She has been widely published, including in takahē, The Press, International Literary Quarterly, Enamel, Shot Glass Journal, Snorkel, Blackmail Press, Turbine, and Landfall, as well as several anthologies.
Sudden Valley Press 