A vivid exploration of New Zealand life through poetry.From Sean Macgregor’s lounge occupied by stoned youths to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven’s second collection presents his clear, clean vision of ‘the lifers’ who inhabit these islands and beyond. A generation’s subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten. Steven’s writing neither patronises nor romanticises in its intricate depictions of small worlds of violence, despair, love, and struggle. Always it refers back to the redemption of human connection as its magnetic pole.For readers interested in contemporary poetry, New Zealand literature, and themes of urban life, memory, and loss.