No Good

by Sophie van Waardenberg

A highly anticipated first poetry collection that is raw and warm and human.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published January 14, 2026

Reviews

[jo]

so tender it made my teeth ache, many perfect examples of saying the thing by not saying the thing / showing the thing by the negative space etc.

insert meme "we get it poets, some things are like other things" but in the most complimentary way possible. some things ARE like other things in the amazing tapestry of life that we live in this interconnected world !!!

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered the poems of Sophie van Waardenberg six years ago in AUP New Poets 5. In there she had a selection of 21 verses called does a potato have a heart? I remember discussion of avocados in a London Sainsbury store, and how they were always ready to eat. At that point Sophie was about to leave New Zealand to study for an MFA in New York State. These new poems, her first solo collection, feel very different and have obviously evolved out of those years of new experiences.
The most noticeable feature of No Good is the way the author has experimented with different forms and formats. The central part of the book contains a series of poems called Cremation Sonnet. There are sixteen sonnets, all with exactly the same title and no obvious way to differentiate one from the other beyond the order or a page number. For me they are the highlight of the book, building in their intensity. One of the sonnets uses the phrase ‘so what’ five times over its fourteen lines, ending like this:

So what?
I cannot accept this ending. I have fallen
From the highest ledge. I will never land.
So what if I am safe? I am not.

The eighth sonnet ends with these powerful lines:

ATTENTION PLEASE. Yes. Stop.
Everyone must feel like this. Must rend.
Must wreck. And yet that cannot be true.
If someone understood, I wouldn’t beg
So much attention. Please, my arms are empty.
I have laid it down, the rank and perfect
Onliness of my loss.

Up to this point it is as thought the poet has been keeping a lid on her emotions. Suddenly there is a burst of power and anguish that come together in the tenth sonnet. It feels like a whole life compressed into fourteen lines. Here it is in its entirety:

They counted out your time left and you spent it
without any extraordinary grace.
They tried to say you’d exceeded expectations.
Maybe in efforts towards love
but not in dying. Maybe in brightness of thread,
consistency of hat, the line of song
bent in horsehair – not in dying. Maybe
in commitment to the wristwatch. To the spirit.
To the ocean. Not in dying. We thought
You’d always laugh while you were speaking
But you wore brown pyjamas you didn’t choose
And you spat out grape seeds and stopped talking.
Then you couldn’t love me.
Then you died. Then they burnt you.

After the Cremation Sonnet comes another selection in similar format. These are called Love Poem and have six sonnets that slowly outline the development of a relationship with all its uncertainties and getting to know someone else. There is a great deal of raw emotion in No Good. There is humour too, but sometime you do feel that the narrator is being too hard on herself:

Darling get tired of me. I’ve no plans to improve.
Isn’t it difficult even inside love
to make tonight’s dinner? Pair the socks?
I see ahead years of tinned vegetables
and faulty decisions; you will lose your keys
and you will die of or beneath something
without me. No these days are barely soft.

From Song of the Selfish Girl come these final lines:

I am
a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.
I do not want anyone to love me.
But when they don’t, why don’t they?

This is a great collection that leaves you wanting more and wondering where this talent will venture next.

[Rebecca]

Note to self: Recommended by Maddie Ballard in Shelf Awareness interview.

[mitch xu]

sometimes you read books. and you think many of them are good, great, or even perfect books. you take a handful of them, and you call them your favourites. and you buy them, you put them on your shelf, these books like gold ingots in hands that have never touched more than a couple hundred dollars at any one time, and covet them by wiping the dust off the tops of them every once in a while.

and then a good friend of yours goes gets published. and that publication takes a good half of those books you called your favourites out back, kisses them how the dutch do (thrice), and shoots them dead without warning.

i think i'm probably a bad reviewer for a work like this because i'm quite horrible at 'getting' poetry—don't yet have the semiotic chops it takes to make sense of things that aren't inherently supposed to make sense. at least, not on first read, which i have done more than one of for some of the pieces from reading them in other places first (see: landfall 249, cordite, the spinoff). and i get them in the way i can get them, which is probably, hopefully enough.

so what i will say as a relative poetry casual is just this: sophie's brain is so huge and her heart is even huger! i know this not just because i know her, but because she speaks of her life and love in these poems in a way only someone with a really huge brain and heart could. each word, their images of unknown america and people i’ll never meet flashing like a supercut in my mind, cutting like teeth and well-chosen to inexorably hurtle me toward wet eyes, though not before earning a quick chuckle from me first. the shape my mouth made reading some of these pieces as they changed my brain chemistry forever.

cooked, served, ate down down to the core, by me and especially by that damn fly on the cover(!!).

also, first. also, thank you. also, more - please! also, you are good, and always will be.

love, mitch xx

[Olivia Welsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is a gift from a friend, who warned me it was full of quite sad, but beautiful, poems. She was right.

I loved the style of writing by Sophie van Waardenberg; how it was clever, but not overly pretentious or confusing. I felt connected to the grief, and love, and hope.

Wishing everyone a fulfilling time reading this once it is officially published.

[8/10]

[Allie · Rating 5 out of 5]

some damn good poems right here

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

well it’s wonderful

[Grace Beaster · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘And something’s next. Here I go reaching. I cannot help myself’ — SvW [[sigh]]

[Abby Fergz · Rating 3 out of 5]

In summer when I picked dandelions
for the geriatric guinea pig I changed the world.
I killed a weed. I filled a mouth with gold.