In early April we released the stunning debut collection, Mad Diva by Cadence Chung. We celebrated the release with a book launch tour full of dazzling musical performances and poetry readings.
The tour started in Wellington at Meow on Tuesday 8 April. Chris Tse officially launched the book for us, and we were also treated to a musical performance by Cadence and the New Zealand School of Music, and a poetry reading by Jackson McCarthy. We were also joined by our friends Unity Books Wellington as our booksellers for the evening.
Cadence then went to Auckland to launch Mad Diva at Time Out Bookstore on Saturday 12 April. It was a lovely afternoon, with a musical performance by Cadence, Sarah Mileham and Tomairangi Henare, and a poetry reading by Zephyr Zhang 张挚.
The next stop on the tour was Dunedin with a launch at the New Athenaeum Theatre on Sunday 13 April. Here, we celebrated with a stunning musical duet between Cadence and Teddy Finney-Waters and a poetry reading by Rushi Vyas. We were also joined by our friends University Book Shop Otago as our booksellers for the afternoon.
Lastly, Cadence travelled to Christchurch to launch Mad Diva at Little Andromeda on Tuesday 15 April. Here, the audience was treated to wonderful poetry readings from Cadence, Claudia Herz Jardine and Amelia Kirkness, and a musical duet between Cadence and Emily-Jane Stockman. We were also joined by our friends Scorpio Books as our booksellers for the evening.
Here's the launch speech that Chris Tse gave at the Mad Diva Wellington launch:
Tēnā koutou katoa. 大家好. It’s my pleasure and honour to be launching this gorgeous, dramatic collection of poetry by the prodigious Cadence Chung.
I’d like you all to cast your minds back to when you were in high school and your own engagement with poetry. It’s likely you were all assigned a poem to read and analyse. Perhaps you wrote some poems of your own for either a creative writing portfolio or you scrawled them into diaries and notebooks, outpourings of teenage dreams and angst that were for your eyes only.
But how many of you wrote and assembled a manuscript for a full-length poetry collection that explored the heartbreaking history of Chinese settlers in Aotearoa?
In 2019, when Cadence was in Year 11 (that’s Form 5 for those of us from the olden days), one of her teachers sent me her manuscript with a request to provide some feedback. Long story short: time got away from me and I regretfully never got around to sending my comments. However, when I read the manuscript I remember being impressed at the level of Cadence’s ambition and her maturity as a young poet.
What struck me most when revisiting that very early manuscript recently is how assured and evocative Cadence’s poetry was even back then. In the intervening years, her use of imagery and voice, and the way she draws inspiration from other artforms, has crystallised into something precise and controlled. Mad Diva is the result of a young writer honing their craft while also expanding the boundaries of their potential.
Unsurprisingly, Mad Diva sits elegantly within Cadence’s oeuvre as a musician and opera singer, and reads like a compilation of the various ways we incorporate performance in our lives, whether it’s assuming the role of the poet, the opera singer, the daughter, the classmate, the friend, the lover or the muse. In this book, all the world’s a stage, and all the divas have main character energy. Everyone else is simply a member of their audience captivated by their every move and lusting for their attention.
Stepping into the world of Mad Diva is to be taken by the crisp air of a Wellington night as you hop from bar to bar sipping martinis at candlelit tables while conversations about art, opera and poetry swirl around you. You catch the unmistakable scent of an expensive designer perfume before glancing across the bar and seeing somebody that you used to know. This is a world of chaste kisses and longing glances, where the great works of literature and music continue to reverberate through the ages and colour our modern lives.
When we turn to art to answer our existential questions about love and mortality, whose voices should we trust? In these poems, characters and figures from the worlds of literature and opera make their entrances and exits like old friends or new lovers, ready to impart a little wisdom or to stir up a memory of a life-changing night.
In Mad Diva there is a constant reappraisal of the greats and their relevance in a modern world of phone chargers and buses that glow like neon angels. Are the impassioned words of poets still gospel, or is it time to search elsewhere for answers? For every dead poet put on blast, there is an even deader poet whose words reveal something worth striving for, like “quiet omens in the great mess of things”. Upon further reflection, perhaps the Old Masters and the Even Older Masters “really had it going with all the wine and orgies and statues with massive penises.”
In light of the current debate surrounding the proposed new English curriculum and whether or not we need to make certain authors compulsory, one line in the poem ‘Fire Island’ stands out to me for its reasonable take: “Someday I’ll love / all the canonical poets of the world / but for now I hope for pulp fiction.” Yes, the Old Masters have their place, but every now and then we just want something a little less traditional to scratch a very particular itch. This is what Cadence gifts us in Mad Diva – lines of piercing insight and dizzying romance that you could send as a hint to your crush in late-night text messages.
Reading this collection reminds me of the tumultuous contradiction of youth: when you feel both free to forge your own path but are also trapped by the pressure of finding your place in the world. Mad Diva makes a case for giving in to your temptations, of letting yourself live by the wild, passionate rules of poetry and opera. It’s filled with poems that invite you to swoon in the intoxication of desire where your senses are heightened by clouds of perfume, the aftertaste of cherry-flavoured cocktails and another’s body heat pulsating on your own skin. But above all, it’s a collection about finding joy in the smallest actions that have the power to electrify your life for just a moment.
Congratulations, Cadence, on this latest addition to your already spectacular body of work as a young artist. I can’t wait to see what the next act brings.