Forthcoming, October 2025
$29.99
132 pp, paperback
195 x 135mm
ISBN: 978-1-98-850351-6
Frankie McMillan is one of the leading writers of the short-short form in English, and Eddie Sparkle's Bridal Taxi, her seventh book, sees her at her best. The prose poems and small stories here demonstrate exceptional range, examining the tiniest psychodramas but also meditating on drownings and shootings and infidelities and nuclear warfare. McMillan finds the unusual in the everyday, and she is equally at home with lovers embracing in the fields and with reclusive aunts fading away in poky old houses. This is writing that reveals humans working out how to be their ridiculous and beautiful little selves. This is writing that feels like thinking.
鈥淚n less time than it takes to boil a kettle, Frankie McMillan鈥檚 story-poems and poem-stories will unmoor your heart. Here is the absurd, dark, beautiful, surreal world, and here is McMillan, holding it out to you in all its brokenness, turning it this way and that until it sings.鈥濃擳ania Hershman
"This dextrous, inventive collection is a masterclass on the possibilities of form. A writer of profound imaginative curiosity, McMillan interrogates real and surreal worlds 鈥 animals, angels, performers, thieves 鈥 with wit, sharp insight and a delight in the small, strange moments of lives."鈥 Paula Morris
Frankie McMillan is the author of four previous books from Canterbury University Press. The Father of Octopus Wrestling was one of The Spinoff's ten best NZ fiction books of 2019 and was shortlisted for the NZ Society of Authors Heritage Book Awards. My Mother and the Hungarians (2016) was longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards in fiction. She has won numerous awards and creative writing residencies, including the Ursula Bethell Residency at the 麻豆传媒高清 (2014), and the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019).
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