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'A Wes Lee poem is a detonation - you don't come away from it untouched.'
- Tracey Slaughter
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'The work is full of dark intimations and melancholy... one is pummelled by
life and weirdly joyous at the incredibly frank state of arrival of their own
being in writing.'
- Eileen Myles
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Originally from the UK, Wes Lee lives in Aotearoa New Zealand.
She has three poetry collections and her work has appeared in a
wide array of literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand,
Australia and the UK including Best New Zealand Poems, Poetry
London, The London Magazine, The Stinging Fly, Westerly, Cordite,
Landfall, Magma, Southword. She has received many awards for her
writing. Most recently she was awarded the Editors' Prize 2024/05
by Magma Poetry; The 2024 Free Verse Prize, by The Poetry Society
in London; The Heroines/Joyce Parkes Women's Writing Prize
2022, in New South Wales; The Poetry New Zealand Prize 2019.
Placed in The Plaza Poetry Prize 2025, and the Fish Poetry Prize 2025.
She was selected as a finalist for the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Prize
2023, in Ireland, and The Sarah Broom Poetry Prize 2018; shortlisted
for The Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2023 (Otago University
Press), and the Alastair Reid Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2024, in Scotland.
Her short story 'How They Live Now' was the subject of The Stinging
Fly Podcast for September 2022, originally selected by Sally Rooney
and read by Susannah Dickey in Dublin.
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Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022
launched by Massey University Press
in New Zealand
Includes over 30 pages of poems & an interview by this year's featured poet, Wes Lee.
'The body remembers in Wes Lee’s poems, pronouncing its truth in strange flashes, loading her pages
with dark stills from an unconscious screen — yet simultaneously Lee articulates her lines with
tense poetic control, sharpening language to scalpel point against the places the body is silenced.
It is this use of acute poetic practice to chart the psyche’s bloodied spaces — to tap through sheer
craft to the carnal baseline of memory and its charged contortions, to front through a fierce, honed
wielding of form the ‘blast holes’ where trauma has forged the body — that has always left me awed
in reading Lee’s work, accosted, exhilarated, struck.' — Tracey Slaughter, 2022
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'This edition's featured poet, Wes Lee, shows the reader many worlds nestled in her 21 pieces ...
She unflinchingly uses words as a scalpel to eviscerate "low-key, incidental, domestic" incidents,
exposing their bloodied internals ... Her poems explore many facets of the human condition
but I was most drawn to those focused intently on the body, mesmerised by the razor-sharp
attention to detail.' — Erica Stretton, Kete: New books from Aotearoa
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'The poems walk on a precarious edge of living. They scratch and lash, they tilt you as read..'
— Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf
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The Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022 is available in bookstores throughout New Zealand.
And can be purchased direct from Massey University Press.
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By the Lapels launched in 2019
by Steele Roberts Aotearoa
in Wellington
'Raw, frank, yet exquisitely crafted', By the Lapels is Wes Lee's second full-length collection of poetry.
An oblique narrative told in fragments, scenes half-glimpsed. The poems unfold, adopting a variety of
poetic personas, interrogating the body, interrogating memory, highlighting a tenuous sense of existence, a
constant negotiation with being in the world.
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'This is poetry that is emphatic in its capacity to endure. It is the song playing on the car
wireless, which greets the first-responders at the scene of a crash. It is witness and black-box . . .
Wes Lee's collection strips sentiment right down to its agonised nerves. It is the brutal, beautiful
crash-landing into the world, the terror of a newsfeed, the animal who has 'seen too much: imprinted
/ on her retinas' . . . Pain is something to carry, and Lee carries it elegantly, and with fierce instinct.
The determination is dogged, vital, and excruciating . . . In a literary scene increasingly fronted
by the gaudy and the cynical, these words quake the pages with their truth.' — Elizabeth Morton,
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021, Massey University Press
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'In her second powerful collection, By the Lapels, Wes Lee shows that she shares Tony Beyer’s deeply mulled
poetic impressionism. The book reads as a novel-like narrative, each poem a slanted entry point to the
ongoing story. The first offering, ‘The Things She Remembers’ is a case in point. A list poem of snatched
image-moments... As in subsequent verses in the collection, this almost-comic set up, combining absurdity
with poetry, becomes – through a series of sharp authorial observations and linguistic twists – something
tragic and profound.' — Siobhan Harvey, Landfall Review Online, Otago University Press
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'By the Lapels is a diverse, edgy read ... Illuminated by sharp-eyed observation, personal insight and,
most of all, a generous sense of our shared humanity.' — Patricia Prime. Takahe 98.
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‘The work is full of dark intimations and melancholy ... One is pummelled by life and weirdly joyous at the
incredibly frank state of arrival of their own being in writing.’ — Eileen Myles,
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‘I was delighted by her ability to explore form and deploy a lucid, image-laden, evocative sense in
her writing ... I kept thinking as I read these poems what they constantly achieve is aligned with the logic
of écriture féminine, and of what Irigaray promised us women writers would eventually achieve: ‘Don’t weep.
One day we will learn to say ourselves.’ — Jen Webb, University of Canberra
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'This is very powerful writing that doesn’t flinch from difficult, sometimes painful subjects. Dense with
visual imagery. Haunted by a sense of enclosure in so many different locations. ‘The wildness I carried away
with me’ seems to be the right phrase for the narrator and the reader after this collection.' – Kerry
Featherstone and Carol Rowntree-Jones, The Overton Poetry Prize
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'One of the best reading experiences I've had this year.' - John Levy (Silence Like Another Name, 2020)
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'Such a strong collection. Dennis Nilsen's Dog Bleep especially, such a great poem! And Polaroids, a brilliant
tribute to Andrea Dunbar.' - Michael Stewart, University of Huddersfield
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By the Lapels is available from ubiq books: University of Auckland, Fishpond, or direct
from Steele Roberts Aotearoa.
Black Spring Press launches
Body, Remember in London
as part of the Lorgnette Series 2017
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'Body, Remember' takes its title from a poem by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, who, in sensuous
imagery, illuminates the persistence and power of the body-memory of desire. Conversely, in this
pamphlet, Lee addresses the body’s capacity to hide, to deceive, and draw a veil of silence, to create
a blank space within when faced with trauma.
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‘These poems are quiet, controlled and sparse, with an accurate ear for rhythm. Body, Remember is a
satisfyingly cohesive collection, each poem adding something to the previous and the next. I found
them intense, strong and immensely powerful.’ – Diane Brown - Landfall Review Online, Otago
University Press
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'In a beautifully coherent cycle of 20 poems, Lee explores the memory of childhood trauma in its bodily
immediacy. Unembarrassed, she speaks it aloud, inhabiting the poetic space without shame ... Lee's minute-
by-minute physical reactions, the stuff that happens with breathing and muscles and skin, are never
pathologised or pitied — instead we are invited to trust in their concrete, corporeal logic and bear witness, as
the body does daily, to the terrible events that they index.' — Elisabeth Kumar,
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020
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'In this powerful pamphlet, Wes Lee investigates how the body can play the role of both subject and
object... It is this lack of being that Lee captures so well, this idea that everything’s present but
something’s still missing.' – Callan Waldron-Hall, Sphinx: Poetry Pamphlet Reviews and Features,
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‘In Body, Remember, Wes Lee catalogues a ‘domino of broken things’ with deft poignancy and dark
humour. She draws our attention to the fact, that even as we read and breathe, our bodies are in a
state of breaking.’ – Michael Stewart, University of Huddersfield
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‘Wes Lee's beautiful, sobering collection gives a skeleton upon which to hang the intangible. It
speaks to transience, to trauma, to the inevitability of time passing.’ – S. J. Bradley, author of
Brick Mother, and editor, The Big Bookend
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‘Amazing poems... very powerful.’ – Rosanna Hildyard
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Body, Remember is available in bookstores in the UK, and can be ordered online from the Poetry Book
Society, Amazon, Fishpond, and direct from Black Spring Press in London.
Shooting Gallery launched
in 2016 by Steele Roberts Aotearoa
in Wellington
'Shooting Gallery is stunning. The poems are assured, brave, and many have already been published
in a wide array of NZ and international journals... The body is prime. And although throughout the
collection pain and indignity are often a given, there is also a glorying in the physical, the sensual;
there is verve, and poems that punch the air celebrating survival... It is striking that in these poems,
no one is judged. The first thing that Wes Lee concerns herself with in Shooting Gallery is the
humanity of each person. Here, the last shall be first, and she ensures that, in this marvellous
collection, we know why this should be the case.’ – Carolyn McCurdie, Takahe Magazine
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“The body is where you begin” could be a tag for this whole book of short sharp poems that knock
against your skull. There’s a woman living in a car, there’s a clown living in you, there’s a couple
living in a barn with a dog and a boar, there’s a memory living in a hotel, there’s a self living in a
mirror ... A book stuffed with tough stuff.’ – Murray Edmond, NZ Poetry Shelf
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‘This is a collection of devastating beauty and power. It's rare to find poetry that can convey so
much, with such brevity.’ – SJ Bradley, author of Brick Mother, and editor, The Big Bookend
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‘With remarkable economy, Wes Lee conjures striking poetic images of the contemporary world.’
– Demos Journal
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‘There are times in this tough-minded and tender-hearted book when you are persuaded that your
odds are not good. On the other hand there are moments – and moments matter for Wes Lee – when
the balance of the universe tips back in your favour.’ – Murray Edmond, Landfall 233: The 70th
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Shooting Gallery is available from Fishpond and can be ordered direct from Steele Roberts in
Wellington.
Cowboy Genes launched at the
Huddersfield Literature Festival
in 2014
'Of the five stories in Cowboy Genes, three struck me: Diseases from Space, The Gardenia Girls, and
especially Crash Test Dummies. If you are weary of cheap cynicism being passed off as profundity,
you’ll feel great empathy for Victor, the central character of this story, who yearns for things that are
life-changing, life-affirming.’ – Jim Greenhalf, Telegraph & Argus
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'There's real depth, complexity and darkness to these stories. I really can't believe Wes Lee
isn't a big name on the short story scene because her work is really very special. If you like the
kind of work that David Lynch makes — dark human stories with an air of strangeness then
this will be way up your street. The quality here is outstanding.' — Dr. Mark Ellis, Amazon.uk, 2019
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‘Poignant and accomplished.’ – Jazz Croft, NZ Booklovers
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‘In Wes Lee’s beautiful chapbook of short fiction, the shadow of death looms.’ – Michael Stewart
(Cafe Assassin, 2015)
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Cowboy Genes is the winner of The Grist Books Chapbook Prize and is published by Grist Books
at the University of Huddersfield; available from Amazon and Inpress Books