The Pistils is a dispatch from the cusp of change. It appears at the severing of a 40-year relationship following the illness and death of poet Janet Charman’s partner during the Covid restrictions. Here, she chronicles her experience with transition
to the digital age, to single life, to carbon neutral. She dissects her Pakeha sensibilities towards colonizing privilege as well as her gender-critical feminist’s astonishment at attacks from allies in the realm of sexual politics. In The Pistils, Charman regards her separation from her grown children in the light of her own parents’ deaths. And she looks to a future in which the crises she anticipates, both personal and environmental, are treated as no less inevitable than they will be mysterious.