Released July 31st, 2024 // 84 pages // 978-1-916938-31-1 // RRP £11.99
Everyone is Everyone Except You, the honest and hilarious debut poetry collection from one of Aotearoa’s most charismatic poets, begins as a eulogy but opens out to a profound acceptance for the less-than-glamorous things that populate a life: failed relationships and confused intimacy; bad advice and poor preparation for manhood. Along the way, unexpected joys emerge, like eloping to Carterton in a Corolla, or getting it on to the memory of the All Blacks. Alternately comical and insightful, Jordan Hamel reinvents the time-honoured portrait-of-the-artist for a millennial sensibility.
PRAISE for Everyone is Everyone Except You:
I want you/like an abandoned warehouse rave/wants a decent night’s sleep’. Funny and irreverent, Jordan Hamel’s Everyone is Everyone Except You is a rollercoaster dive through reckless desire and religion, queerness and masculinity-in-crisis, that will leave you in hysterics or tears. ‘Don’t you want to be chained to the infinite bedposts of your pasts?’ Hamel asks, but beyond his quick wit and gut-punching lines that will leave you gasping for air, comes a yearning for intimacy, the question of how, despite all our past failures, will we find our way back to each other again.
— Maia Elsner
Jordan Hamel’s Everyone is Everyone Except You is a dazzling tangle of heartfelt lyric poetry, therapy speak, catholic guilt and pop culture references. People ‘collide like vacant stars’ both irl and in an online dreamscape. Somehow both deeply funny and Richard Sikenesque, you’re not going to want to miss this collection.
— Phoebe Stuckes
Both emotionally-wrong footed and diabolically sincere, a brilliant & compulsive read.
— Hera Lindsay Bird
ABOUT Jordan Hamel:
Jordan Hamel is an Aotearoa writer, performer and Fulbright Scholar. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. His debut collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You, was originally published in New Zealand by Dead Bird Books in 2022. He is the co-editor of No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of NZ climate change poetry from Auckland University Press (2022). He is the former NZ Poetry Slam Champion, the winner of the 2023 New Writers UK Poetry Prize and the 2023 Sonora Review Poetry Prize.
