Āporo Press
Āporo Press is a micro-press established and run by Damien Levi and Ruby Leonard. The press aims to publish works by minority voices in Aotearoa New Zealand and fill gaps in the market left unaddressed by major publishing houses.
The press publishes across forms and genres, including anthologies, poetry, comics, zines, novels, and more. Regarding themes, there is a specific focus on platforming work by LGBTQIA+ individuals, Māori and other writers from minority communities.
Āporo Press authors include Sloane Hong, Nicola Andrews, Laura Vincent, Jo Bragg, Anthony Lapwood and more.
Hoods Landing
by Laura Vincent
Rita considered the dead. Shut her eyes. Rolled their names around her brain. Stacked each person in order like folded laundry, warm and crisp from the sun. She wondered how her name would sound amongst them.
In the rural reaches of Auckland, the women of the eclectic Gordon family gather for Christmas. They may push each other’s buttons, but know precisely when to offer tea (or a tipple). Rita, the 50-year-old baby of the family, is planning to tell them she has cancer. Drifting between past and present, she considers the lives of women in their community and reckons with what it all means for her future and her family.
Featuring elderly lesbians, twins who aren’t twins, and several dogs named Roger, Hoods Landing is about shoddy pasts, ambiguous futures and the imperfect bonds that tie family together.
Overseas Experience
by Nicola Andrews
In her full-length poetry debut, Overseas Experience, Nicola Andrews (Ngāti Paoa, Pākehā) finds herself on two sides of the Pacific Ocean, writing to and from Tāmaki Makaurau and San Francisco.
From Overseas, billionaires, the digital realm, Dr. Ropata and a rogue pōhutukawa collide. It’s a world beyond the long white cloud, examined through its eccentricities and familiarities.
The Experience is all-encompassing—full of being Māori, being a hōhā, being a nerd and being fully crack up. The in-between is a transitory existence of liminal spaces, aeroplane meals and customs fatigue that muddles the direction of ‘home’.
Deeply referential and rewardingly funny, Overseas Experience is a collection resonant with anyone who’s made a new home across the sea.
so sip your water, smile at your gated community
make your last declarations, pounamu in hand
before your throat dries out like a myna
warbling in the springtime, broadcasting
here i am here i am here i am
Marrow & Other Stories
by Sloane Hong
Marrow & Other Stories brings together a collection of short comics by Sloane Hong into print for the first time. Although varied in content, each story explores how we relate to each other and the world around us—through grief, love and our innate curiosity of the unknown.
Plagued with intrigue and often unsettling, these gloriously stylish panels peel back layers of the human psyche, exposing them, throbbing and pulsating, for all to see.
Spoiled Fruit: Queer Poetry from Aotearoa
edited by Damien Levi and Amber Esau
Spoiled Fruit is the debut title from micro press Āporo Press. This collection gathers 20 queer poets from across Aotearoa, compiles work largely first published on bad apple and asks these poets to reflect upon their work to create new pieces. Emerging from this introspection are themes of growth, evolution, change and transition. Like spoiled fruit fallen and left to rot, new growth emerges.
Contributions from Nicola Andrews, kī anthony, Francis Aschoff, Jo Bragg, Cadence Chung, Rhys Feeney, Ted Greensmith-West, Haukupu, Kyra Lawler, Rex Letoa Paget, Casey Lucas, Ivy Lyden-Hancy, Amy Marguerite, Jackson McCarthy, Hannah Patterson, Ngaio Simmons, sylvan spring, El Spurlock, Fetūolemoana Tamapeau and Laura Vincent.