About: John Adams

Tells me she has four hives already, a good start, and she’s been planting manuka up and down the valley; says she dreams of a hundred stonkin’ little hives hidden there, primed to discharge a barrage of bees. Their lazy hum will ruffle the declivity of the valley and the syrup will seep all the…

a slim woman slants water from a squat jug into a glass tumbler every lie hides its truth the thing is not what but else there is a where neither consonants nor vowels hush there the bell yet to ring already can’t be un-rung I sense an unknown silence where thoughts unform float and I…

For my first I gave him a soft tracing of my neck. Remember how beautiful I was then. My necklace encircled that slender isthmus, tethered from my straight back, passing the elegant pair of shoulders, swooping down to traipse those undulations where his eyes picnicked whenever he paused. Whirr whirr whirr. I heard his pulse,…

Winter solstice week, and the elderly widower lunching in the Gallery Café is engaged in conversation with a woman of equivalent circumstances, both at apparent pains to recover their pattern while the familiar light lasts. Outside, the rim of an upturned bucket fills with rain water, rendering a liquid veneer as broad as the original.…

We are mammals, my friend with emphysema and I, so, like a tightrope walker over Niagara reels in his journey, step by step, we traverse our passage, breath by breath, along an invisible cord of continuous air, from the moment we set the placenta aside until we ripen to rejoin it. The cord of air…

His first collection Briefcase (AUP, 2011) won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Poetry Book in the NZ Post Book Awards.  The judges commented: “What makes Briefcase extraordinary is the way Adams’ experimentation depends upon the heart as much as it depends upon the intellect. This is a debut collection that moves you…