“Tate Fountain’s debut is a collection of the self, of longing and love. The selves in the poem are created and continued, they are known and unknown, lost and found again. They’re there but not there. The book is lush, sweet and real. Fountain has a deft hand at mixing serious questions into unserious settings and vice versa. It is full of jokes, codes, denials, erasures, colours, intimacy, and many small details and observations. From hex codes to Vogels toast with golden yolks, to heartache, to nectarines. It’s full of people too: you and I, literary figures, characters and friends. Fountain writes gently and dreamily with a strong sensory focus. These are poems I want to read in summer, near water, with ripe fruit and birds singing. I want to have them read to me as I fall asleep. In this difficult world, love poems bring us back to ourselves and to each other. This collection is full of poems to remind us why connection is at once so fraught and so wonderful.” —Emma Barnes “I want to live in the lush world of Short Films. It is filled with violets, marigolds, bad karaoke, bright fruits. This world radiates so much love that paintings come to life when passed and teenagers get on the bus for free. I’ve been punched in the gut by Tate Fountain’s mastery of language, but to quote Wet Leg, I kinda like it cause it feels like being in love. Respectfully, you’d be a fool not to read this book. You’ll be thinking of these poems later, and later, and later.” —Leah Dodd “I love the erasures, the rhythms, the bracketed mysteries, the puns and the echoes, the wild weird intelligence of this collection. It is literature as geometry, a bouquet of hibiscuits, full of hunger and punctuation, constantly surprising, allusive and conversational, funny and wired, totally wonderful.” —Anna Jackson

Tate Fountain is a writer, director, theatremaker, and editor based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a current member of the Starling editorial committee, and recently coordinated a series of live events for the samesame but different LGBTQIA+ Writers and Readers Festival. She holds a Master of Arts (First Class Honours) from the University of Auckland. She’s pretty much always thinking about films.