over under fed by Amy Marguerite

In her impressive debut, over under fed, Amy Marguerite offers an unflinching poetic exploration of hunger - literal, emotional, and spiritual. Drawing from her lived experiences with anorexia, romanticism, and tangled, often painful intimacies, Marguerite’s collection unfolds as a raw, dissonant ode to the human condition. Published by Auckland University Press, this collection marks the emergence of a bold and distinct voice in contemporary New Zealand poetry.

Marguerite's work is at once deeply personal and darkly lyrical. Her poems refuse to romanticise suffering, yet they draw beauty from it with surgical precision. In "discharge notes (ii)", she writes, “gratefulness is sore you can’t / ever expect anyone to feel how they have made you / feel especially if they’ve never almost / been dead”—a line emblematic of the collection’s stark honesty and vulnerability. Her lineation resists neatness; enjambment and fragmentation echo the troubled relationships with self and others that she so (paradoxically) effortlessly chronicles.

The thematic reach of over under fed is vast. While much of the collection centres on eating disorder recovery, it just as powerfully contends with obsession, religious doubt, and romantic disappointment. Poems like “measuring (in)sincerity” and “trust at 33,000 feet” move from hospitals to kebab shops to churches and badminton courts, weaving the sacred and profane into a textured whole. Her language is often, surprising, a mix of psalm and slam, and her metaphorical imagination is striking. In one poem, the sky becomes “a hot artery on dry ice”; in another, the speaker is “a miracle offcut. / a doctrine-hooded heretic.”

Marguerite’s voice resists easy categorisation. It is confessional, yes, but never indulgent. Her tone veers between wry humour, biting irony, and quiet devastation. She writes with the urgency of someone who must speak, even when the subject matter claws at silence. Her short-form work, such as “far too blue” and the punchy “i was hungry,” demonstrates her gift for distillation—turning visceral experience into dense, imagistic language that lingers long after reading. One senses that for Marguerite, writing is not just catharsis but resistance: against erasure, shame, and the sanitising of illness.

Structurally, the collection is unpredictable in the best sense. Divided loosely by thematic and temporal shifts - particularly in the "ward 25a" section, which reflects on inpatient care - it offers a jagged chronology that mirrors the nonlinear nature of recovery and desire. Marguerite’s stylistic choices (irregular spacing, broken lines, lowercase titles) enhance this sense of instability and deliberate rupture. There is a tangible feeling that the poet has broken form to tell the truth.

over under fed is not easy reading, nor is it meant to be. It is a book that bares its teeth, then weeps in the same breath. But it is also affirming in its fierce refusal to sanitise suffering or simplify survival. In its pages, Amy Marguerite offers something rare: poetry that is uncomfortable, necessary, and alive.

A triumph of erratic tenderness and poetic control, over under fed cements Marguerite as one of the most exciting new voices in Aotearoa literature. This is not a collection that talks to the audience- it howls, whispers, and sometimes just breathes. We would all do well to listen.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Auckland University Press