Nice things people say, out of context:

RE: Naming the Beasts

‘…Naming the Beasts is an awe-inspiring feat. Like Sexton’s work, tonal ironies, fierce laughter, and glinting intellect shine, but they never quell the cutthroat heart … It’s a book that reminds you that page was once pelt, our sentences scraped onto skins from the first, our language inextricable from animacy. It’s a book of revelations, words on all fours who hunt through the wilds of body and mind. And it ripples with what I can only describe as genius, inextinguishable, undeniable’ - Tracey Slaughter - Launch speech

‘Morton's visceral and intimate third collection is a self-professed 'gnarly' read; gloriously jewelled sentences brim with rich and dark language…. This is post-pastoral NZ gothic; trees and flowers giving way to rotting ox carcasses and deep dread… A rich and rewarding book of poems for those who like to chew words down to the bone’ - Manon Revuelta from 95bFM’s Loose Reads

‘This is poetry in full flight, fight, curl and claw, and its creatures are loaded with heat’ - Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor - Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook

‘Elizabeth Morton’s Naming the Beasts is poetry gold. It is the kind of book you savour slowly, absorbing brocade textures, the sumptuous threads, the surprising patterns, satisfying layers. This is poetry that is sonorous, sensual, startling.’ - Paula Green - NZ Poetry Shelf

‘In her new collection, luxuriously laden with disquieting imagery and metaphor, Elizabeth Morton presents the world as one where humans have obtrusively inserted themselves … Morton’s portrayal of this world is bursting, where the very elements are failing to resist the destruction wrought on them … where only the beasts still run on, attempting to outlive the crazy, chaotic, flamboyant mess around them’ - Jessie Neilson - Takahē 106

‘Morton’s pithy, verbose poems shimmer with the iridescent blues of blowflies lifting off an ox’s carcass. Cattle trucks and heatwave nectarines ferment summer stenches that invoke a sinister nostalgia’ - Rebecca Hawkes - Cordite

‘Elizabeth Morton’s Naming the Beasts is also a third book. It is her richest book so far, lexically, and its often-sumptuous wordscapes give the poems a unique texture … There is a strong sense here of a poet assembling words in never-before-seen combinations as the only possible way to define the world she observes. Morton is not just thinking in language, she is thinking through language, and we are watching the process. This is poetry as a kind of fMRI scan, an in-flux map of neural activity’ - Erik Kennedy - Landfall Review Online

RE: This is your real name

‘Elizabeth had already set herself apart as a poet of breathtaking force, edge, intensity and empathy – This is your real name is another stunning, irrefutable, crucial book, a fearless personal testimony and a blistering political act. It goes to the places we need poetry to go to, places that only a language loaded with heart and shimmering with pressures can name. It smashes the glass’ - Tracey Slaughter - Launch speech

‘Always insight and buddy tenderness and grace’ - Siobhan Harvey - NZ Herald

‘No elegant Latinate words or flowery sentences can do justice to Elizabeth Morton’s This is your real name, a huge, stunning entity that will leave you breathless’ - Dadon Rowell - Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021

‘Morton’s dramatic sense and talent with imagery produce many poetic standouts’ - Nicholas Reid - New Zealand Listener

‘This is the joy of poetry: you think a poem and you feel a poem. It might be political or personal or a dense thicket, with multiple pathways and myriad connections to a peopled world. Elizabeth’s subject matter is wide ranging. Stories appear like neon lights or fleeting shadows or veiled self exposures. Sometimes it feels like the sun is out and sometimes like pitch-black night. The reading rewards are glorious’ - Paula Green - NZ Poetry Shelf

‘To describe This is not your real name as a weed in a garden of flowers is in no way an insult. It is to say, here is writing that knows how to survive’ - Molly Crighton - New Zealand Poetry Society

RE: Wolf

‘Wolf’s 60 poems hurtle you into the guts of life. Reading the book is an entirely sensory experience … the grit and the spit, the licking, peeling, splitting, weeping and bruising’ - Bronwyn Lloyd - Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2018

‘Wolf is an absolutely breathtaking collection of poetry that Morton has crafted together with perfection. There is a little bit of Wolf in her and in all of us: the jagged parts of the heart, the strangeness of the night, and ultimately, the sadness’ - Emma Shi - Booksellers NZ

‘In Elizabeth Morton’s poems nothing is certain, except that they create and occupy a vivid and mysterious world’ - C.K. Stead

‘Elizabeth Morton’s Wolf is a darting, vigourous collection of poems that shift perspective from piece to piece to create a vivid sense of the human animal, where wild instinct clashes with the given order of things’ - Claire Mabey - Landfall Review Online