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over under fed, Amy Marguerite
Auckland University Press, 2025

Poetry Shelf so often reminds me we don’t work in a vacuum, that we write out of, alongside and sidepaths from what we read, that we are nurtured by writers that catch our hearts, that challenge and feed our intellects. As the title suggests, Amy Marguerite’s debut collection, over under fed, navigates various hungers, but it also satiates, as both reader and writer. Amy mentions two literary lifelines: Virginia Woolf and Eileen Myles. And poignantly, she thanks editor Emma Neale for prioritising ‘tenderness and curiosity’ in the collection. My skin is prickling.

from here
the lovely thing
(that i do not know

to be lovely yet)
ascends to the pleasure
centre of the brain

from ‘reuptake inhibitor’

Amy is writing of her experience with anorexia nervosa, a difficult infatuation and a spiky relationship. A whirlpool of hunger. An eddy of cravings and desire. Tough stuff. Yet two words, light and loveliness, instil a drumbeat, an insistent pattern beneath the propelling smash of living and a syncopated recovery map.

As I read, I keep falling into a borderzone of oxymorons where loveliness might not be lovely, where full becomes empty, or empty full, or where close smudges far, where is rattles is not, it’s pain and relief, absence and presence. And it is strange and wonderful and utterly recognisable.

Self exposure is a risky form of charting ways of being. Think acute and full-throttle feeling: ‘my poetry is firing / steel-capped neurons / at the waistline of / stale grief’. Or the temptation to burn ‘diaries / in a roasting dish’. Then again. Then again. It is ellipsis and hints, wit and sublime nuance.

[ … ] i dream of the day my eyes
are the seeds of a green bell pepper. the world is already
far too blue and squinting at what light.

from ‘far too blue’

More than anything, over under fed, is catch-in-the-throat writing – not just the subject matter – but how the words on the line sing. The visual and aural catch in ear and eye heightens the poetic rewards, the surprises. It is both startle and delight as you read.

let yourself submerge
in a puddle
of your own making

from ‘only womb’

Press your finger into the poem, upon the skin of its making, feel its beating heart and warmth and chill, and then again, warmth. Herein is the texture, the tactile, the finger touch of poetry. This collection. This collection, navigating the pulse of illness and recovery, reflection and refraction, whether self or world. Put your finger on the pulse of wonder and feel what poetry currents can do.

A reading

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‘managing isolation’ and ‘love language’

A conversation

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

Oh totally, heaps! This collection took a heck of a lot of patience. Some poems took me eight or nine years to write, so I was sitting in the waiting room for a truly maddening time! Perhaps the most irritating thing was feeling as though this room was at once of my own making and entirely beyond my control. That was my body being clever and protecting itself, but I didn’t know that then. I doubt that this new knowledge will make the wait any more tolerable in future, just maybe more understandable, and I think I can love that.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?

What matters most to me now as a writer is messiness and silliness. There was a time when I thought poetry had to look like a well-made bed in order to be considered good poetry—or even just poetry—but now all I really want to see, both in my own writing and in the poetry I consume, is a bed that hasn’t been touched since sleep, a pillowcase that resembles the peeled-back wax coating of a Babybel cheese, and a bottom sheet stamped with menstrual blood. I am increasingly attracted to this kind of disarray.

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?

Eileen Myles! I can’t remember how I initially came across it but there’s this one interview with Eileen called “A Poem Says ‘I Want’” that really worked some magic on me. In this interview Eileen describes how, up until “some piece in the 20s”, they were constantly making decisions but “never taking any steps”. They also mention how they were constantly writing poetry during that time but didn’t really notice because it didn’t seem important, until they wrote what they thought to be a “good poem” while at work one day. It was then that they were like, “Huh. What if the poem is real and all this is not?” I remember pausing the interview right here and choking on my own saliva (I was also smiling a lot so that was deeply uncomfortable). I already knew that poetry was the real thing and that work (Eileen’s “all this”) was not, but still there was this new sense of wondering all over me