Forthcoming, October 2025
$29.99
132 pp, paperback
195 x 135mm
ISBN: 978-1-98-850351-6
Frankie McMillan is one of the leading writers of the short-short form in in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Eddie Sparkle's Bridal Taxi, her seventh book, sees her at her best. The prose poems and small stories here demonstrate exceptional range, examining the tiniest psychodramas but also meditating on drownings and shootings and infidelities and nuclear warfare. McMillan finds the unusual in the everyday, and she is equally at home with lovers embracing in the fields and with reclusive aunts fading away in poky old houses. This is writing that reveals humans working out how to be their ridiculous and beautiful little selves. This is writing that feels like thinking.
“In less time than it takes to boil a kettle, Frankie McMillan’s story-poems and poem-stories will unmoor your heart. Here is the absurd, dark, beautiful, surreal world, and here is McMillan, holding it out to you in all its brokenness, turning it this way and that until it sings.”—Tania Hershman
"This dextrous, inventive collection is a masterclass on the possibilities of form. A writer of profound imaginative curiosity, McMillan interrogates real and surreal worlds – animals, angels, performers, thieves – with wit, sharp insight and a delight in the small, strange moments of lives."— Paula Morris
“Frankie McMillan hides the mystery of both our deepest psychological wounds and our most valued intimacies, inside poems and stories that enchant, the way intricate, miniature, singing mechanical birds might: but beware, they are sharp-eyed, and can bite with the teeth of truth.” — Emma Neale
Frankie McMillan is the author of four previous books from Canterbury University Press. The Father of Octopus Wrestling was chosen by The Spinoff as one of the ten best New Zealand fiction books of 2019 and was shortlisted for the New Zealand Society of Authors Heritage Book Awards. My Mother and the Hungarians (2016) was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in fiction. She has won numerous awards and creative writing residencies, including the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury (2014), the University of Auckland Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre (2017) and the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019). McMillan spends her time between Ōtautahi Christchurch and Mohua Golden Bay.
