CADENCE CHUNG
Mad Diva
Mad Diva is Chung's third book and first full-length poetry collection. It will be released with Otago University Press in April 2025, and pre-orders are available here.
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Saturday nights at the cocktail bar, Jackson and I
talk about history books. As if we’ll have any say in it at all.
– from ‘Curtain’
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In Mad Diva, poet Cadence Chung takes us wheeling and diving through a scintillating whirl of ideas, experiences and imagery. Operatic in scale, by turns lush and spare, Mad Diva is a high-wire performance from an extraordinary emerging talent. This beautifully crafted collection confronts the chaos of life full on. The gorgeous jostles up against the grotesque. Romance and glamour have equal billing with the blood-streaked and the gritty. Scheherazade shares the back seat of a Wellington Uber; Samson’s in the bathroom getting a shave; Leilah on a plastic stage considers the history of ‘Chinamen on display’; Carmen suffers a real-life stab wound and sings the Habanera like a bat out of hell.
Bejewelled, perfumed, mascaraed, satin-and-silked and never shy to be brazen or camp, the ever-unravelling divas in these poems are not interested in staying within assigned categories. In opera houses, art galleries, dive bars, bedrooms; in the purple light of Whitcoulls at dusk and in Wakefield Street at midnight, they keep on aiming for their high Cs, keep on testing the world for meaning, acceptance and love.
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‘Brilliant in so many ways …This diva pulls you along in their twirling wake.’ – Anne Kennedy
Mythos
As part of the 2023 Ruth and Oswald L Kraus Innovator-in-Residence Scholarship at Wai-te-Ata Press, Cadence created Mythos, an audio-visual anthology of art by young New Zealanders. The anthology features poetry, music, and visual art, combined with an audio version which can be accessed for free on Bandcamp.
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The artists were given the broad theme of ‘Mythos’ to encourage them to think about the various mythologies that shape our lives. As submissions rolled in, the collection began to grow into itself, cataloguing the wide variety of mythologies we take into our lives. It speaks of rituals, of deeply engrained stories, of the ‘canon events’ that develop us as people and as artists. There are a lot of similar experiences, such as the childhood nostalgia of the first section, stories of skinned knees and beach days and siblings. Other experiences are deeply unique. In particular, there is a focus on legacies and canons — the poems Cadence wrote for this collection both reference the dusty backrooms of Western literary pasts. In Aroha Witinitara’s poem Archaeology, they sum this all up with the simple phrase, “I want a turn with the shovel.” We all want to dig into pasts — cultural, personal, imagined — and get the satisfaction of uncovering the unexpected.
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Mythos was launched on the 12th of March 2024. The book is available from Good Books, and Unity Books, both online and in-store. More stockists will be added throughout the year.
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Reviews
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anomalia
Cadence Chung’s visceral and intelligent debut anomalia casts poetry as scientific investigation. Populated with strange specimens, cicada husks and glittering gems, these poems explore the love and cruelty in human nature. Chung is in conversation with her literary ancestors, from Sappho to Byron, bringing their work into the world of sparkly eyeshadow and McDonald’s bathrooms. She writes with an open heart, cut through with sardonic wit. Anomalia dissects the ideas of otherness, belonging and desire.
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anomalia was written during her final year of high school, and was published in April 2022 with Tender Press (formerly known as We Are Babies Press). It was #10 in the national bestsellers charts the week it was released. It can be purchased from the publisher website here, or at most independent bookstores.
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“Cadence Chung’s poems are bursting with sensory imagery: the noise of cicadas, the pulse of blood, the smell of wooden cabinets. Obsessed with dissection and vivisection, they feature specimens brimming with heart, but also with spleen, brains, intestines and liver. ” - Airini Beautrais
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“…a glorious debut, full of excess and charisma.” - Francis Cooke
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“At turns self-conscious and radiantly unhinged, Chung’s Anomalia contemplates the love and loneliness of anomalous subjects, inviting her reader-creatures to examine life from the other side of the glass." - Rebecca Hawkes
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Reviews
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Elizabeth Heritage, Kete Books
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