These vivid, poignant, often sardonic pieces contemplate a range of subjects from rollerskating to rabbits, from being David Bowie to first love, heartbreak, and Friday night fails. They include an extraordinary series of reports from the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes: "In the days following the earthquake, there are no birds flying over the city. They’ve taken wing and flown away from the devastated city. The only noise on the cracked streets is the deep hum of generators; the throb of helicopters and the crashing thud of machinery working through the night trying with all its mechanical might to put the city back together."
"Zara Potts' essays are lockets full of prose - small, shiny treasures holding powerful memories. Through her gift for precise detail, she pulls readers into her experiences of love and loss and evokes them in sweet, bitter fragments." - Ronlyn Domingue, author of The Mercy of Thin Air, The Mapmaker's War, The Chronicle of Secret Riven, and The Plague Diaries.
"Zara Potts is a poet. Only someone with her gift for language could render a devastating natural disaster with such beauty and clarity, could so confidently navigate the powerful and turbulent emotions rolling seismically beneath the once solid surface of a thriving city. - Richard Cox, author of Thomas World, The God Particle, and The Boys of Summer.
ISBN 9780991395231
2015
Kindle $2.99
A Talent for Shipwrecks