The Sleeptalker Poems / Schaeffer Lemalu

by Schaeffer Lemalu (1983-2021)

A new collection of the two chapbooks published by the poet and artist during his lifetime, honouring their original material conditions, with an afterword by Lisa Samuels.

Published November 2026
Softcover, 92 pages
ISBN 9781067072711

$35.00

The Author

Schaeffer Lemalu

Schaeffer (1983-2021) was a poet and artist from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He published two chapbooks, Sleeptalker (2018) and Sleeptalker 2 (2020), and exhibited paintings at Robert Heald Gallery.

Press

Essay on posthumous publishing by Chris Holdaway in The Spinoff

Praise

Lemalu’s poems fracture and fragment, forcing both our reading eye and our listening ear into a seemingly casual mimetic relationship. Yet, within the everydayness of his poetics, these lines are minimal mini-masterpieces: portals into a sensitive and intellectual realm that is at once both invisible and utterly life-giving.
—Lynley Edmeades

Folded now together like a pair of wings (and they are wings), the poems of SLEEPTALKER and SLEEPTALKER
2 are the emblems of a man who has been visited by messengers, each of whom carries the news of every living thing’s unique eternity. And after these visitations, Lemalu saunters a while across our common world, revising it ever so gently with a new lustre and new urgency.
—Donald Revell

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