Winner of the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry in the MitoQ Best First Book Awards at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

'In this inventive and poignant collection, Jackson Nieuwland explores and explodes the limits of how we write about identity and all its aching complexity and beauty. The question posed in I am a human being isn’t so much who, but what am I? Nieuwland offers many answers by upending the boxes we’re expected to fit into, scattering their contents like jigsaw pieces to be sorted and reconstructed into something new and extraordinary. These poems swing between the deadpan and the surreal, inviting us to reject the obvious and embrace the mess of who we are as individuals in a world that demands easy categorisation.' --Chris Tse (author of He’s So Masc)

Jackson Nieuwland is a human being, duh. They are a genderqueer writer, editor, librarian, and woo-girl, born and based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They co-founded the reading/zine series Food Court. This isn't even their final form.