SONJA YELICH was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1965. She was published in AUP New Poets 2 in 2002. Her first solo collection of poetry, Clung, was published by Auckland University Press in 2004. She lives in Bayswater, Auckland, with her partner Vic and their 4 children.

Yelich comments: ‘The Glenn of “glenn & the crashroom”, is the poet Glenn Colquhoun who just happens to be a doctor. I was having a conversation with him on the phone about accidents and the Accident & Emergency Department in a hospital and he referred to it as a crashroom. Of course I found the word hugely attractive and the rest of the conversation turned into a blur.

‘The line about hitching an accident to a star comes from a childhood accident – when I slipped through a glass door and needed stitches all over the place. I remember a nurse saying to me to hitch my accident to a star – and then everything would stop hurting. Didn’t work one iota.’

 

Poem: glenn & the crashroom