Kay McKenzie Cooke chronicles life as it comes to her – the quotidian happenings in and around her home in Dunedin and further south where she grew up, and not-so-ordinary upturned world she experiences when she visits her son in Berlin. And then there are those things that seem ordinary enough until the poet flips them over so she can locate the beating heart. Whanau and tupuna (Kay is Ngai Tahu and Pakeha) and the natural world are the places Kay is happiest and she writes with candour about grief and joy, loss and discovery. What comes through time and again in her work is a deep resilience born of always having one eye on the great mountains and rivers of the south and the other on the small things people hold close to make sense of an increasingly perplexing world.