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Mark Pirie was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1974. He is the Managing Editor for HeadworX, a small press publisher of poetry/fiction. His poems and critical essays have been widely published in India, New Zealand, Australia, Croatia, the US, Singapore, Canada and the UK. In 1998 University of Otago Press published his anthology of 'Generation X' writing, The NeXt Wave. He is an editor of JAAM literary journal (New Zealand), a member of Writers International, the contributing New Zealand editor for papertiger: new world poetry, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Antipodes (USA). He has published ten collections of poems and a book of short fiction. In 2003 Salt Publishing, Cambridge, England, published his new and selected poems Gallery: A Selection.

(Tate Modern 2005)

it's a video/short film
two characters involved:
Sascha and her Mum
so what happens? you ask

well, it's in a bedroom
and Sascha is being choked
and wrestled across the floor
it's a sign of their closeness

and in between, there's a
few smiles, some laughing,
but not for long, then it's back
to Mum choking, strangling Sascha

are they showing us this
to portray how we really are
one minute: tender; the next:
cruel?; whatever the roles

familial or otherwise:
I noticed quite a few people
beginning to leave,
feeling just a little sick.