Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026

Tracey Slaughter’s 'all souls': Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026 is both an anniversary volume and a living record of contemporary poetry in motion. Marking seventy-five years since Louis Johnson established the original New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, this sixtieth issue honours that history while showing why the yearbook remains vital.

With 138 new poems, 29 reviews, essays and featured poet Josiah Morgan, all souls is generous in scope without feeling merely crowded. Slaughter’s title gives the issue a resonant centre, holding together poems of grief, memory, illness, ageing, desire, humour, ancestry and ordinary life. Darkness is present throughout, but so too are wit, tenderness and flashes of renewal.

The collection’s strength lies in its range. Established and emerging poets sit alongside one another, creating echoes across voice, style and subject. Place, body, language and inheritance recur without becoming programmatic. The reviews add further value, sustaining a serious conversation around poetry in Aotearoa.

Like any large anthology, it is best read slowly, allowing individual poems room to breathe. 'all souls' is a generous, restless and necessary anniversary edition.