Goddess Muscle
Goddess Muscle spans work written over a decade. The poems are both personal and political. They trace the effect of defining issues such as racism, poverty, violence, climate change and power on Pasifika peoples, Aotearoa and beyond.
“Goddess Muscle is crafted like a symphony, an experience of shifting life seasons and subject matter, so as you read the effects are wide reaching. Karlo faces significant political issues: climate change, the Commonwealth, colonialism, racism, Ihumātao, ‘the daily politics of being a woman, partner and mother’. She faces these global and individual challenges without flinching. The resulting poems are essential reading, never losing touch with song and heart, always insisting in poetic form how we can do better.”
Paula Green, New Zealand Poetry Shelf
Books
What People Are Saying
“It’s a collection about empowerment, of a voice that won’t dim for others, and a voice that beyond all else relies on its own Goddess Muscle through it all. This is a valuable collection, one that I will draw from for years to come.”
Wednesday Review, Academy of New Zealand Literature
— Lana Lopesi
Goddess Muscle is a gift. I can barely account for how it will stretch your reading muscles, your beating heart, your enquiring mind, your compassion, your music cravings, your empathy. Karlo has extended her own poetic muscle and offered poetry that is wisdom, strength, refreshed humaneness. I am all the better for having read it.
Spinoff Review of Books
— Paula Green
“Be ready to leap between ages, hop between heavens, language, and lives… If you have wondered what it means to be connected to land, to be in tune — try these poems on, follow their directions. Take the prescription therein. Let the Goddess Muscle flex and flow, and tell me that stretch doesn’t feel good.”
New Zealand Poetry Society
— Tamara Tulitua
Karlo Mila’s The Goddess Muscle is a wondrous collection, an alchemy of ‘molecular lovemaking’ joining our beginnings and our endings in a uniquely framed Pasifika/ Aotearoa lens… The Goddess Muscle is full of movement, colour, sensuality, death, wayfaring. It’s a celebration of life. She is the quintessential New Zealand poet.”
Takahē Magazine
— Sarah Maindonald
“Let me be clear: books like this only come along once in a generation – if we’re lucky… In this ground-breaking poetic text, Mila’s writing carries us safely through the cyclone of personal and political turmoil, and like the manu tai (our ancestral oceanic guide) reveals ancient indigenous pathways for those of us who have lost our way.”
Spinoff Review of Books
— Leilani Tamu
As a seafood lover of fierce appetite, when I see Karlo’s title Goddess Muscle I hear, see, and taste Goddess Mussel. I have told her this. These delectable poems do justice to all that is goddess within and outside of the many shells we wear… It articulates the permission required – not exclusively but especially – by brown goddesses to love ourselves.
Spinoff Review of Books
— Selina Tusitala Marsh
A Well Written Body
A Well Written Body was published by Huia Publishers in 2008. A collaboration with artist Delicia Sampero, this poetry book is filled with paintings and poetry. It focus on issues―identity, belonging, birth, being a mother, wife, and lover―that resonate for both women. This book is now out of print.
Dream Fish Floating
Dream Fish Floating was published by Huia Publishers in 2005. It was awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry.
"With her roots in Pakeha New Zealand, Samoa and Tonga," said the judges, "Karlo Mila writes with flair, energy and passion, creating a direct, accessible poetry. This multi-cultural, lyrical voice is one the judges expect to hear a lot more of."
”It is a dynamic and absolutely compelling reflection of the cultural and linguistic fusion that Aotearoa and the Pacific is now.” Mau’alaivao Albert Wendt.
Dream Fish Floating is available as an eBook.
Excerpts
Malaga: The Journey (from Goddess Muscle, 2020)
(for Alice Suisana Hunt)
It is a spindrift
that rises from the body.
Our final exhale
beyond the breath,
where we give ourselves up
in completion
to life.
Where everything that you are
leaves behind
everything that you were.
Departing
that faithful friend
of the body.
Its soft limbs.
Its forgiving flesh.
Muscles, skin, sinews ‒
all that held you together ‒
so gently,
for so long.
A song
of water, blood,
breath and bone.
We acknowledge all that you have left behind.
All that you have given.
And what a life you have seen,
and what a life you have been
and how we have loved you.
We stay here,
with that precious vessel
that carried you
through this life,
but cannot carry you
into the next.
And may we who loved you,
holding the song, blood and bone vessel of your being,
may we carry the meaning
of your life forward
into the world of light,
so that it will reach
those who come after.
He waka herehere ngā waka.
The vessel that binds us
to the great moving fleet.
We know that it’s your time to depart,
to embark on an ancient route of return,
along the terrestrial contours of this land
that has birthed and fed you,
this land on which we stand,
towards a celestial flight-path
beyond the wingspan of birds,
into the stars,
towards the warmer weather of our dreams,
towards islands we have held gently in our memories,
where we once belonged.
At Te Rerenga Wairua,
where two oceans meet,
a pōhutukawa tree still holds,
waiting for you
with a fragrant, green-leaved,
red-crowned,
farewell.
The whole earth heaves
a sigh of release.
And from here,
wreathed in red and green,
you will bid us farewell
and begin to travel the ocean roads.
The sea path traced by star walkers,
past Tongatapu, to ‘Uvea and Futuna,
where with the splitting of rocks, it all began.
You will enter the deep, blue channels
of ocean and night
and move between worlds
of underwater darkness and celestial light.
You will take flight.
Until you reach Savai’i
and follow the black lava fields
towards the last rites.
Here, you will be cleansed
in the waters of Falealupo.
The final farewell at the seashore.
It is here we face that truth,
that you are westward-bound.
Ia Manuia Lou Malaga.
Blessed be your journey.
Follow the shining trail
of the setting sun
towards the great mystery
beyond all of our knowing.
We must trust then,
in all we cannot understand,
and like the land,
heave a heavy sigh of release.
O le mavaega nai le tai e fetaia'i i i'u a gafa.
The farewell at the seashore,
with the promise
to meet again in the children.
Inside us the dead (from A Well Written Body, 2008)
(For Albert)
Albert said,
“inside us the dead”
maybe I wouldn’t feel so lonely
if my body could recall those connections
there are only silences.
I am bound
this place time and space
the vā with the past is broken.
Even when pregnant
my body feels like a ship lost in water
afloat, remote, solitary and
heaving with seasickness.
I did not feel the mercury line
connecting those before me
to their destiny.
I am not capable of thinking
this blood is a ripple
in an ocean of our blood / I am
the next wave
of a tide that has been coming
for a long time / this vein
leads back to my bones.
This is what I have learned from books.
I am an individual.
But I suspect my body remembers you all.
The curve of my legs,
the shape of my fingers,
the face of my son.
Yes, every limb,
every bend
every bone
is a recollection of
who has been before.
A memory
of all the bodies that have been
the making of me.
Inside us the dead.
Image credit: Delicia Sampero
Hook, Line and Sinker (from Dream Fish Floating 2005)
You dangled something silver
something sexual
into the gulf between us, flirting
a magnetic rainbow of colour, flashing
and I didn’t notice the lines
just opened my mouth and kissed you back
only to find a hook in my tongue.
I did not know then
that you were a fisherman of some repute
an angler of casual sex
an expert at gutting women
filleting feelings into tidy boneless packages.
You admit that it is only the flesh you are after
brains, stomachs, livers, hearts
these are all discarded
when you are finished
only what you deem palatable remains.
And
knowing this
I find myself
gutless, spineless
hoping only
that I am sweet in your mouth
that as you consume me
you will say
She’s the best I ever had.