Over Under Fed

Description

perhaps the good things
that come to those who wait
are the leftovers
of those who have
already waited.

In her debut collection, Amy Marguerite explores the peculiar loveliness and specific loneliness of the human condition. Writing from experiences with anorexia nervosa, limerence and a particularly tumultuous situationship, these poems act as a confessional to hunger, desire and immoderation.

Precise, vivid and sometimes disturbing in detail, over under fed seeks to reconcile chaos and recovery.

o heathenry pinfeather
uncreated creature
just eat.

 

 

 

Author Biography: Amy Marguerite is a poet and essayist based in Tamaki Makaurau. She completed an MA with distinction in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies including Spoiled Fruit and white-hot heart and has featured in literary journals, magazines and publications including Starling, Turbine and Sweet Mammalian. Her essay on the new generation of Aotearoa poets appears in Auckland University Press's forthcoming anthology Te Whariki.

Reviews

‘Amy Marguerite has a completely original voice and sensibility that makes everything she writes extraordinary and compelling. This is a collection as much about desire, requited and unrequited love, and other forms of relationships – especially relationships with women – as it is about the hunger to live fully and beautifully, the hunger for beauty and intensity, the hunger for a charged, combustible life of dreams and elation.’ — Anna Jackson

‘In this stunning debut collection from Amy Marguerite, we are taken on an ever-dizzying but always dazzling journey of obsession and love and obsessive love that guides us through a landscape of pain, dysphoria, eating disorders, trauma, mental health and hope, with the compelling, compassionate and incisive insight of someone who has struggled in the webs of their ghosts and is weaving anew. These poems dare you to enter into the spirals and not be changed, slowly but certainly finding solace in the flux. With a masterful use of repetition, an eloquently distressed and elegantly restrained lyricism, over under fed explores the spirals of the mind in a knowing chaos of the body, asking us how we might map our way through perpetually falling as we yearn to be caught and seek to fly.’ — Amber Esau