books
Touch Screen (Otago University Press, 2025)
The word ‘touchscreen’ entered the English language in the early 1970s to describe a computer display screen that also functions as an input device operated by touching its surface. In this absorbing collection, Touch Screen, poet Philip Armstrong dismantles this now ubiquitous term and helps us see its component parts afresh – ‘touch’ and ‘screen’ strangely reconfigured in today’s complex technological world.
In poems that range from the personal lyric to retellings of myths and stories long held in the human imagination, Armstrong explores the rapidly evolving interface between human and non-human worlds. Touch Screen brings us face to face with being alive here and now, and asks the urgent question: Can you feel it?
Mid-day mid-week mid-scroll and touch
screened far too long, I’m struck so flat
I’m lying face-up on the carpet
when something reveals itself: above me
showing only when my eyes drift
hangs a single thread of spider silk.
From ‘Jacob’s Ladder’
Armstrong’s nimble voice is both hilarious and profound. – Anne Kennedy
These are poems that are confident in their well-earned and rich strangeness. – Erik Kennedy.
Armstrong’s blend of humility and laughter weaves a cogent, almost spiritual, spell; his entranced language renders a remarkable sense of the sheer weirdness of life on earth. – Pat White.
Read sample poems from the book on Newsroom, here and here.
Read Pat White’s review in the Landfall Tauraka Review here.
Read Nicholas Reid’s review in the NZ Listener here.
Read Siobhan Collins’ and Anna Smith’s launch speeches here.
Order Touch Screen from Otago University Press here.
Listen to an interview with Philip about Touch Screen here.
Sinking Lessons (Otago University Press, 2020)
Winner of the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
The poems in Sinking Lessons portray the vitality of a world full of things and beings we too often disregard, using language that vibrates in harmony with the lively tales it tells – from small, everyday events to stories of shipwrecks and strandings, resurrections and reanimations, arctic adventures and descents into the underworld. The cast of characters includes members of the poet’s family alongside heroes from myth and literature, such as Orpheus, Scheherazade and Frankenstein’s Creature. And crowding in upon these, at all times, a multitude of non-human protagonists: sun and stars, wind and water, mud and sand, body fluids, decaying matter, chemicals organic and inorganic, and a great many fishes and birds and beasts.
“Sinking Lessons is an accomplished, engaging collection that displays literary skill and a sharp intelligence at work. The poems range easily from the personal to wider issues like the environment and history. There’s a great affection for life of all kinds – human and the natural world – coupled with an awareness of the fragility of existence.”
– Jenny Bornholdt, Judge of the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
Read a sample poem from this collection: “Sinker“
Read a review of the book by Anne Kennedy here.
Read a review by Molly Crighton on the NZ Poetry Society site here.
Read a review by Rushi Vyas in the Landfall Review here.
Read a review by Kirstie McKinnon in the Otago Daily Times here.
Read John Newton’s launch speech here.
Listen to Philip in conversation with Laura Jean McKay at the 2020 WORD Festival here.
Order Sinking Lessons from Otago University Press here.
poems in journals and anthologies
“Mollusc Song”, New Zealand Listener, August 9-15 2025.
“Ink Blots”, The Sunday Poem, Newsroom, 3 August 2025.
“Time of Death”, runner-up in the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize, Landfall 248, Spring 2024.
“Black Druid” and “Dualism”, Landfall 245, Autumn 2023.
“Immram“, PN Review 269, 49.3, January-February 2023.
“Foreign Accent Syndrome”, Pleiades 42.2 & 43.1 2022-23.
“The Advancement of Learning”, Landfall 243, Autumn 2022.
“Personality Test“, The Spinoff Friday Poem, July 15 2022.
“My Own Goals”, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2022, p. 60.
“I Acknowledge Mine“, takahē 102 (August 2021), p. 63.
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Landfall 241 (May 2021), p. 86.
“Obiter Dicta”, Landfall 218 (Spring 2018), pp. 55-56.
Five poems, PN Review 243 (45.1, September-October 2018), pp. 17-18.
“Life of Clay”, Sport 44 (2016), pp. 13-22.
“Driving Lesson”, “General Relativity”, Snorkel 23 (September 2016).
“Portolan”, Landfall 227 (Autumn 2014), pp. 19-22.
“Laputa”, “Longitude”, Snorkel 17 (April 2013).
“Wildlife of the Wet Tropics”, JAAM 30 (2012), pp. 11-12.
“A Horizontal Light”, Snorkel 14 (October 2011).
Philip Armstrong 