The Beautiful Afternoon

By Airini Beautrais

In The Beautiful Afternoon, award-winning poet and short-story writer Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are. Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife - in which she writes about the body becoming a poem and human touch beginning to feel safe again - Beautrais' lucid examination of experience reveals that the personal is inescapably political. Throughout these wide-ranging essays her vigilant critique of entrenched patriarchal control turns anger to resistance, as a woman finds a way out of its grip, back to herself and the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1776921321
• ISBN13: 9781776921324
• Release Date: March 2024
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.3"