Spellbound by Francis Aschoffy

Francis Aschoff’s Spellbound is a vivid and emotionally restless debut collection that moves through love, memory, desire and uncertainty with striking imaginative force. The poems travel across different stages of life, from childhood to first love to scenes of adult vulnerability, yet the collection is less concerned with neat chronology than with the way feeling returns, adjusts and refuses to stay buried.

Aschoff writes with a sharp eye for the ordinary objects and places that gather emotional charge. Public spaces, bodies, animals, old habits and half-remembered moments become sites of pressure, where tenderness and discomfort sit close together. The poems are often funny, but the humour carries an edge. It is the kind of wit that arrives when a speaker is trying to make sense of pain without making it tidy.

Much of the collection is concerned with love, though not in any simple or decorative sense. Love here is difficult, hungry, imperfect and sometimes absent even when its shape can still be felt. Aschoff is interested in attachment as much as affection: what people cling to, what they survive, what they mistake for safety, and what they cannot quite release. The result is a book alive to the contradictions of intimacy. Its speakers want to be known, but they are also alert to the cost of exposure.

There is a strong performative quality that comes through in Aschoff’s work, unsurprising given their background in theatre and multimedia art. The poems often feel aware of voice, gesture and timing. They turn quickly, sometimes abruptly, from confession to image, from joke to ache, from softness to confrontation. This gives the collection energy and immediacy, though it can also make some poems feel crowded. At times, the intensity of image and emotion presses so hard that quieter moments risk being overwhelmed.

Yet this excess is also part of the book’s appeal. Spellbound does not present feeling as polished wisdom. It captures emotion in motion, while it is still messy, bodily and unresolved. Aschoff’s imagery is one of the collection’s most memorable qualities, capable of making the familiar seem newly strange. Their best poems do not explain themselves too much. They trust the reader to sit inside uncertainty.

As a first collection, Spellbound announces a distinctive poetic voice within contemporary Aotearoa writing. It is intimate without becoming narrow, playful without avoiding pain, and politically aware without flattening itself into statement. Aschoff’s poems are drawn to the places where longing, shame, humour and hope overlap. The result is a debut that feels raw, inventive and yet also fully awake.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

5ever

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