Compound Press

Coming November 2025 from the vision of Nirvana Haldar, connecting poetries and poetics of Aotearoa New Zealand with that of South Asia and its diaspora.

Featuring art by Llenyd Price. Launch event in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Samoa House lane 19th November 5:30pm.

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Special issue connecting the poetics of Aotearoa New Zealand with South Asia and its diaspora.

Featuring: Ana Iti, Anisha Sankar, Arielle Walker, Fazal Rizvi, Frances Libeau, Imaad Majeed, Jasmin Singh, Liam Jacobson, Priyanka Chhabra, Shivangi Mariam Raj, Shripad Sinnakaar, Ya-Wen Ho.

Editor’s note

This one remains to be an ode for those who cannot sleep, for those who can and cannot grieve, and for those that live in interrupted durée.

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In pursuit of generating a critical dialogue on borders, colonial nations and settler states, we have invited artists and writers to record their relation to these interrogations.

The fragmentation of the “South Asian” identity and its diaspora through the nation state’s homogeneity, has led to the erasure of spaces and its people. We have invited these interventions to ground themselves in Aotearoa, and in writing from this place, to understand borders, homogeneity, and the erasure of these spaces and people from “South Asia”.

We hope that this issue helps us arrive to the

memory of a place,

memory of a martyr,

memory of fleeing,

memory of reaching,

memory of a scent,

memory of a loved one,

memory of a home or many.

We hope that this issue holds space for all the grief that may come through this fragmentation, and together, creates an archive of spacio- temporal interventions by these poets.

—Nirvana Haldar