Fast Talking PI

Selina Tusitala Marsh's often angry, celebratory, vigorously enquiring, story-telling, singing, lamenting, weeping, and ever-vital, poems fling the reader into a sphere that will be unfamiliar to most: the sensibility of a New Zealand New World urban-cultured, but also ancient tribal, poet of amazing energy. Many of these poems accumulate immense momentum over several pages and deposit the reader gasping at the end.

Marsh is 'an academic, a literary critic' of Samoan, Tuvalu, English and French descent — but she is also a campaigning incarnation of the Life Force. A relentless affirmer, she takes no prisoners during this book's campaign against staid, proper, restrained, refined poetic conventions which are also too often a refuge of a racist, patronising, repressive and exploitative Establishment.

Fast Talking PI (pronounced pee-eye) can be seen as a redressing of the balance, a presentation of an itemised account of what is owing. If you want to know something of what seethes in the minds of indigenous peoples throughout the world, this is a good place to start.

Selina was selected to represent Tuvalu for the Cultural Olympiad Poetry Parnassus in London 2012.

ISBN 978-1904614-35-7 (pbk), 978-1904614-77-7 (hbk)
Size: 216 x 138 mm (pbk), 223 x 145 mm (hbk)
Pages: 80
Published July 2012

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