Get Some

Get Some - Sonja Yelich

Auckland University Press, ISBN 978-1-86940-423-9, $24.99 pbk

Edgar is a marine in bad need of a wash and a gun. The deeper he is lost running around the streets of Baghdad, the filthier he gets. get some follows Ed and the responses of his family to his tour of ‘doody’ – but other voices break through the perpetual static of gunfire and electronic noise. Sonja Yelich serves up a whirlwind of perspectives on the war and on contemporary American life.

Sonja Yelich was born in 1965 in Auckland, New Zealand, the child of a European immigrant family that featured regularly in her early poems. Educated in Auckland, she is a trained teacher who studied literature at university. She lives in the seaside suburb of Bayswater, on Auckland’s North Shore with her partner and four children.

Sonja’s first solo collection, Clung (Auckland University Press, 2004) won the 2005 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. A poem of hers won the 2003 National Radio Montana Poetry Day competition, selected by former Poet Laureate Elizabeth Smither from about 2000 entries.

Sonja’s poems appear regularly in journals and e-zines such as Turbine, Trout and Snorkel, and have been selected for online anthology Best NZ Poems Online in 2002, 2005 and 2006. Her work first appeared in book form in AUP Poets 2 (AUP, 2002) and she is anthologised in the book-and-CD set New New Zealand Poets in Performance (AUP, July 2008).