Short/Poto
edited by Michelle Elvy and Kiri Piahana-Wong

Short / Poto is the first of its kind: a fully bilingual volume of flash fiction, with English and te reo Māori translations displayed side-by-side across every two-page spread. Subtitled The big book of small stories / Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero and edited by Michelle Elvy and Kiri Piahana-Wong, this anthology serves a dual purpose. It is both a collection of one-hundred works of short, short fiction by established and emerging writers, and a language-learning resource.

Any keen language student is always on the lookout for high-quality material to aid language acquisition. One of the best methods is ‘parallel reading’ – a well-established yet increasingly popular technique where the native and studied languages are read side-by-side. This approach is immersive and comes with built-in comprehension support. It reduces the vocabulary burden, and allows for pattern recognition. Yet parallel resources that engage and satisfy intermediate and advanced readers are few and far between, even for students of French, Spanish and Mandarin.

While the number of books published in te reo Māori has steadily increased, bilingual diglot fiction remained virtually non-existent until 2017, when Hēmi Kelly – who also worked on Short / Poto – translated Witi Ihimaera’s Sleeps Standing / Moetū. This became the first English-Māori novel for adult readers with parallel text. Last year brought two further bilingual works: Airana Ngarewa’s Pātea Boys, a collection of short stories with both English and Māori versions (though not presented in parallel), and He kupu nā te māia: He kohinga ruri ­nā Maya Angelou, featuring side-by-side translations of Maya Angelou’s poetry. Short / Poto places a new kind of bilingual resource into the hands of te reo Māori learners: one hundred works of flash fiction.

The anthology delivers the variety to be expected from its wealth of contributors, with words by literary luminaries – Bill Manhire, Tina Makereti, Owen Marshall, Paula Morris, Emma Neale – alongside emerging voices. The pieces range from short to shorter, the briefest being Temaari Ngawati’s ‘Womb’, at sixty words, and the longest clocking in at around four-hundred. Some lean more towards prose poetry in style, others feel lyrical, some surrealist, and a few satirical. There are stories set in Venice, Antarctica, Malaysia, and local supermarkets. Stories about parachuters, seaweed, and moon landings. Desire is a recurring theme, as is identity, connection, loss, justice, and climate anxiety.

Editing such an ambitious volume was a logistical feat. Elvy and Piahana-Wong collaborated with ten translators, pairing each with the authors whose work best aligned with their voice or strengths. Ben Brown’s ‘Bro Story’ captures playful vernacular in both English and te reo:

Bro looks at me and says, ‘You got the mana, bro…’ He’s asking a question, not making a statement. I say, ‘We born with the mana.’ Bro says, ‘Yeah, but did you keep it?’ I say, ‘Bro, that’s a heavy question.’

Ka titiro mai te parata me te kī mai, ‘Kei a koe te mana parata…’ Kei te uia mai, hei aha te kī mai. Ko tāku, ‘I whānau mai tāua me te mana.’ Te kī a te parata, ‘Āna, engari i pupuri tonu koe?’

Short / Poto is also a celebration of flash fiction, a form of storytelling that demands precision, restraint, and intention. Every word must earn its place. The strongest pieces in the collection offer more than rich imagery, artful language, and atmosphere alone. Some can read like fragments carved from longer works, or need more information about their original contexts.

The most compelling entries pack an emotional punch. They are larger than their word count, they surprise, and they carry weight despite their brevity. In Tracey Slaughter’s playful yet unsettling, ‘The story where you’re kept’, a past lover reappears to haunt the narrator from within the punctuation of the narrative.

I was tired of your fingerprints on my sentences but you just laughed and brushed at freckles, dark commas, through my blouse.

As the story unfolds it becomes increasingly claustrophobic, and the figurative ghost feels inescapable and borderline abusive, closing with: ‘The last line looked airtight, but I could hear you breathing.’

Tusiata Avia’s ‘This is a photo of my house’ unfolds like a real estate viewing, beginning with innocuous descriptions of the property—‘it has pink bricks and a big tree’—but the details grow increasingly disturbing.

The carpet is dark grey and hurts your knees, it doesn’t show any blood … be careful of the small girl in the corner … here is the phone: ringthepoliceringthepolice.

The narrator proceeds to take the walls of the house apart and watches from a distance as the ‘feelings’ of the spirits inside stretch into the darkness as shards of light.

In ‘Carnal’, Cadence Chung explores the consumption of meat, and the tension between disgust and desire, and natural verses unnatural. At family gatherings ‘Ye Ye would cook pork’ and ‘the blistered skin on top was always perfect’, but the narrator begins to see herself as the pig, her arms ‘covered in a thousand rice-thin hairs’. She starts spitting steak down the toilet and pretending that ‘a body was not just meat’, then attempts to mask the scent of her own flesh with unnatural products: ‘plasticky esters and ethyls’. The conflict is heightened to carnal verses divine in the closing image, when her friend’s ‘stir-fried beef, laid on its altar of rice noodles’ becomes a ‘weep-worthy thing’.

Humour also finds its place. In Karlo Mila’s ‘Touch in the age of Covid’ lockdown loneliness and touch-deprivation cause the narrator to desire a threesome with two tall blond men speaking Russian in tight tracksuits. And in the satirical ‘The pineapple park’, Rebecca Styles considers the link between mental health and consumerism following the purchase of pineapple cake, pineapple lollies, pineapple chap stick and rides in a pineapple golf cart at a pineapple-themed tourist attraction.

Certainly, this compilation of stories makes for a sensory reading experience. Evocative and rich imagery will gratify the reader and challenge the advanced language learner – like the ‘bulbous china Buddha clothed in colours and children’ that sits on the piano in Linda Jane Keegan’s ‘The Buddha in my window’. Or Carer 1 and Carer 2 snapping latex gloves, wiping between legs, and wedgie-ing ‘Mimi’s pink PJ pants up to her armpits’ in Grace Yee’s ‘Duty’. And Emma Barnes’s take on grief in ‘The Crowd’:

When the bassline and the drums are inside my entire body they always shake up grief like sediment in water so that I am the sediment and my tears become water.

The anthology’s design – by Kate Barraclough – presents a Gordon Walters-like rhythm to its bold cover and black-and-white repeating arrangement, with spreads that mirror each other from page to page. The small, boxy shape fits easily in a bag for reading on the go, and feels satisfying to hold. In the tradition of good design, Short / Poto unites form and function: it is an attractive volume of literary variety, ideal for underlining, annotating and re-reading.