The Intimacy Bus
In The Intimacy Bus, award-winning poet Janet Charman reckons with some of life’s heaviest traffic: bereavement, grief, ageing, loneliness, gender, sexual identity, power and inequality. Along the way, the collection gathers up encounters with friends and strangers, and reflections on matters as various as Korean telenovelas, classic films, personal memories, ‘modern life’, real estate, ‘sex treats’, companion animals, a favourite hairdresser, finding joy, a grandmother’s politics and the rapper Psy.
Shorn of sentiment, direct and uncompromising, Janet Charman’s The Intimacy Bus arrives as an irrepressible affirmation of love, life and lesbian desire.
– the heart quakes
inundate
continue on
from ‘still watching?’
Reviews and Interviews
'I admire Charman very much as a poet and this new collection, and I like the way that the title The Intimacy Bus works as a governing phrase throughout the collection. So in reading a book of poems we are sometimes often, particulary with a poet who seems to be addressing us very direclty as Charman does, we are onboard a kind of intimacy bus and, let me tell you, this is often at times a very intimate bus that we’re aboard.'
Harry Ricketts for Nine to Noon RNZ Read
'Charman opens the poem in her own life, closes it, and relinquishes it to the person she’s addressing – a subtle and complete acknowledgement of the ultimate unknowability of her subject’s life. Charman offers up a great deal of candour in this collection and all those that have preceded it, but she stops short of telling us everything … These poems are honest, not gratuitous.'
Sophie van Waardenberg for Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books Read
About the author
Janet Charman
Janet Charman is a complete original, utterly distinctive in voice and content. She received the Best Book of Poetry Award at the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Cold Snack. At the 2023 New Zealand Ockham Book Awards her 2022 collection, The...
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Surrender 
The Pistils Back