show you're working out
Wholesale $18.25 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9780473751500
Poetry
What do you get if you cross Pākehā stories from the rural south of Te Waipounamu with scissors, glue and a want to reveal structural and personal violences of settler colonisation? It’s not a joke but some parts of liz breslin’s third full length collection, show you’re working out, are funny.
The play on ‘your’/’you’re’ destabilises a singular sense of story — showing that you’re working out is what it can feel important to do in a relationship, or a small community, when you want to be accepted. And ‘show your working out’ is what maths exams at school sometimes say. Put marks on the page to signify the thinking that you have done.
liz’s experimental and engaging marks on the pages of this collection include poems about complicity, crocs, cycling, DIY, domestic abuse, the queerness of hands, Pride, Pilates, needlework, what gets called nature, reality tv, scissoring, sharks, Sharon from the Speight’s ads, wellness culture and white supremacy.
By Liz Breslin
Published by Dead Bird Books
Released July 2025
Soft cover
82 pages
Praise
“Breslin’s commitment to social justice emerges not just in her themes but in her poetic practice: inclusive, intersectional, unafraid. Her poetry does not seek comfort; it seeks truth, transformation, and the radical act of witness. In this current moment of a world on fire, Liz Breslin writes poetry as a reckoning.“
— Jeanette Wikaira, Chair, Hone Tuwhare Trust and Chair, Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival, author/editor of Books of Mana
“To read this book is to cycle through the Aotearoa countryside queering its ruggedness and unsettling its colonial dream/hellscape. I consider myself lucky to write in Aotearoa where I can learn from someone who lives poetry in the way Breslin does. All the detritus of life is repurposed in the DIY building hands of this poet. As I put this book down, I carry its winding corridors within me disoriented, bewildered enough to face the news and carry on.“
— Rushi Vyas, Author of When I Reach For Your Pulse and Between Us, Not Half a Saint (with Rajiv Mohabir)
“These fresh, zingy poems are not afraid of the dark. They structurally reinvent the poetic form, reminding us that we too can change up our lives. Liz Breslin’s writing grapples through the mountains, and finds a way out to the sea.”
— Jo Randerson, Barbarian Productions
“Breslin is a former poetry slam champion, and she brings the immediacy and intensity of performance to the page, while the skill and intricacy of these poems keeps you returning to them. These poems are shaped and sculpted. They carve the page in interesting ways. Her deft stitching together of lesbian scissoring memes via TikTok with the nineteenth century workbasket, is alone worth the price of admission. YOU SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK!”
— Alison Glenny, author of /slanted, Bird Collector and The Farewell Tourist
Wholesale $18.25 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9780473751500
Poetry
What do you get if you cross Pākehā stories from the rural south of Te Waipounamu with scissors, glue and a want to reveal structural and personal violences of settler colonisation? It’s not a joke but some parts of liz breslin’s third full length collection, show you’re working out, are funny.
The play on ‘your’/’you’re’ destabilises a singular sense of story — showing that you’re working out is what it can feel important to do in a relationship, or a small community, when you want to be accepted. And ‘show your working out’ is what maths exams at school sometimes say. Put marks on the page to signify the thinking that you have done.
liz’s experimental and engaging marks on the pages of this collection include poems about complicity, crocs, cycling, DIY, domestic abuse, the queerness of hands, Pride, Pilates, needlework, what gets called nature, reality tv, scissoring, sharks, Sharon from the Speight’s ads, wellness culture and white supremacy.
By Liz Breslin
Published by Dead Bird Books
Released July 2025
Soft cover
82 pages
Praise
“Breslin’s commitment to social justice emerges not just in her themes but in her poetic practice: inclusive, intersectional, unafraid. Her poetry does not seek comfort; it seeks truth, transformation, and the radical act of witness. In this current moment of a world on fire, Liz Breslin writes poetry as a reckoning.“
— Jeanette Wikaira, Chair, Hone Tuwhare Trust and Chair, Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival, author/editor of Books of Mana
“To read this book is to cycle through the Aotearoa countryside queering its ruggedness and unsettling its colonial dream/hellscape. I consider myself lucky to write in Aotearoa where I can learn from someone who lives poetry in the way Breslin does. All the detritus of life is repurposed in the DIY building hands of this poet. As I put this book down, I carry its winding corridors within me disoriented, bewildered enough to face the news and carry on.“
— Rushi Vyas, Author of When I Reach For Your Pulse and Between Us, Not Half a Saint (with Rajiv Mohabir)
“These fresh, zingy poems are not afraid of the dark. They structurally reinvent the poetic form, reminding us that we too can change up our lives. Liz Breslin’s writing grapples through the mountains, and finds a way out to the sea.”
— Jo Randerson, Barbarian Productions
“Breslin is a former poetry slam champion, and she brings the immediacy and intensity of performance to the page, while the skill and intricacy of these poems keeps you returning to them. These poems are shaped and sculpted. They carve the page in interesting ways. Her deft stitching together of lesbian scissoring memes via TikTok with the nineteenth century workbasket, is alone worth the price of admission. YOU SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK!”
— Alison Glenny, author of /slanted, Bird Collector and The Farewell Tourist
Wholesale $18.25 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9780473751500
Poetry
What do you get if you cross Pākehā stories from the rural south of Te Waipounamu with scissors, glue and a want to reveal structural and personal violences of settler colonisation? It’s not a joke but some parts of liz breslin’s third full length collection, show you’re working out, are funny.
The play on ‘your’/’you’re’ destabilises a singular sense of story — showing that you’re working out is what it can feel important to do in a relationship, or a small community, when you want to be accepted. And ‘show your working out’ is what maths exams at school sometimes say. Put marks on the page to signify the thinking that you have done.
liz’s experimental and engaging marks on the pages of this collection include poems about complicity, crocs, cycling, DIY, domestic abuse, the queerness of hands, Pride, Pilates, needlework, what gets called nature, reality tv, scissoring, sharks, Sharon from the Speight’s ads, wellness culture and white supremacy.
By Liz Breslin
Published by Dead Bird Books
Released July 2025
Soft cover
82 pages
Praise
“Breslin’s commitment to social justice emerges not just in her themes but in her poetic practice: inclusive, intersectional, unafraid. Her poetry does not seek comfort; it seeks truth, transformation, and the radical act of witness. In this current moment of a world on fire, Liz Breslin writes poetry as a reckoning.“
— Jeanette Wikaira, Chair, Hone Tuwhare Trust and Chair, Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival, author/editor of Books of Mana
“To read this book is to cycle through the Aotearoa countryside queering its ruggedness and unsettling its colonial dream/hellscape. I consider myself lucky to write in Aotearoa where I can learn from someone who lives poetry in the way Breslin does. All the detritus of life is repurposed in the DIY building hands of this poet. As I put this book down, I carry its winding corridors within me disoriented, bewildered enough to face the news and carry on.“
— Rushi Vyas, Author of When I Reach For Your Pulse and Between Us, Not Half a Saint (with Rajiv Mohabir)
“These fresh, zingy poems are not afraid of the dark. They structurally reinvent the poetic form, reminding us that we too can change up our lives. Liz Breslin’s writing grapples through the mountains, and finds a way out to the sea.”
— Jo Randerson, Barbarian Productions
“Breslin is a former poetry slam champion, and she brings the immediacy and intensity of performance to the page, while the skill and intricacy of these poems keeps you returning to them. These poems are shaped and sculpted. They carve the page in interesting ways. Her deft stitching together of lesbian scissoring memes via TikTok with the nineteenth century workbasket, is alone worth the price of admission. YOU SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK!”
— Alison Glenny, author of /slanted, Bird Collector and The Farewell Tourist