The Beautiful AfternoonThe Beautiful Afternoon

"In The Beautiful Afternoon, Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are. Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife - in which she writes about the body becoming a poem and human touch beginning to feel safe again - her lucid examination of experience reveals that the personal is inescapably political"--Back cover.