Poetry

Poetry is my first love

My poems moves in and out of personal, ethnographic, and autotheoretical modes, exploring themes of embodiment, motherhood, relationship to place, and human connection.

Awards

“Wed” – 3^rd Place, NZPS International Poetry Competition, Open Section (2021)
“Fingeryeyes; Social Scripts; Flow” [3 poems]- 1^st Place, Ethnographic Poetry Competition – Society for Humanistic Anthropology (2020)
“Southern//Cross” – 1^st Place, ‘Writer’ Competition, Staff Poetry category – University of Otago (2020)
“The Glass Teacher” – Commended, NZPS International Poetry Competition, Open Section (2020)
“Rearview” – Commended, National Poetry Day ‘Given Words’ Competition (2020)
“A selected of papers translated from birdsong” – 2^nd Place, NZPS International Poetry Competition, Open Section (2019)
3^rd place, ‘Who Cared? Otago Nurses in WW1’ Poetry award – Otago Museum (2016)

They often find her undressed
in just the skin of her sound
petticoats wet with the rivulets
that run down her sentences
like sand
slip underground
From ‘grain of her voice’ (Wardell 2019)

Are you writing this tree
to the exclusion of the world?
Or does the world writhe and bud
from its dark yearly pods; a politics
of birth and rot, consuming green rain
shifting daylights…
From ‘Enough’ (Wardell , forthcoming)