Wherever bodies of water are, people settle, and stories collect. Six generations of poet Airini Beautrais’ family have lived near the Whanganui River, the restless, all-encompassing figure at the heart of her fourth collection Flow. Flow is a brilliant polyphony of stories – large, small, geological, ecological, and human – that draw on many forms and voices and move through various stages of human settlement up to the present day. In March 2017, in a world first, the Whanganui River was granted the status of legal personhood. ‘This remarkable sequence winds and eddies like the Whanganui River, filtering the region’s many histories into something exhilarating and readable. Is verse the future of history?’ —James Brown.