Paula Harris avatar

Paula Harris

Poet and accidental essayist, with work published in various journals, including The Sun, Passages North, New Delta Review, Pleiades, Prelude and Aotearotica. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award.
[ugh]
New Zealand

Selected work (10 publications)

Passages North, 2023
when I was fucking a lot of men when I was 19 and 20 (and 18, and 21) I was fully aware that it was partly because I love sex and partly because – having grown up being told I am unlovable – I...I am not good at upskilling men who are virgins or barely beyond being virgins – apologies to the women who they fuck after me, it’s just not something I’m good at teaching – so I can get them up to technically correct sex
poetry
prose poetry
New Delta Review, 2021
ode to all the scenes in Insecure where a man is going down on a womanlet us praise season 3 episode 1 when Dro pauses to say “ooooh, I missed you…” and Molly shushes him, puts her hand on his head and gets him right back down to work
poetry
Prelude, 2022
I am a bad house guest, even though I try to be a good guest by minimising the amount of space I take upI confessed I’d been a bad guest and he smiled that wicked smile of a man who is Very Satisfied and said I was a Great Guest
poetry
LEON Literary Review, 2021
today an editor told me that what I write isn’t poetry and so maybe I don’t know how to write a poem but I was thinking about you and wanted to write something; so here is your somethingyou are the bath filled with green marbles I slip into at night to wash myself you are the letterbox overflowing with sleeping ladybirds I check compulsively for mail
poetry

Videos