It’s a midwinter Monday night and Hera Lindsay Bird – New Zealand’s most exciting young poet – is tucked up in bed in pyjamas and a robe her boyfriend calls “too Laura Ashley for human consumption”.

Her first book of poetry – a provocative, raunchy bestseller – was published in July by Victoria University Press and a reprint has already been ordered.

The self-titled book has catapulted the 28-year-old from a respected but anonymous graduate writer to semi-cult status, and she is well aware that her life and work are now inextricably bound together. She’s also pretty OK with that.

Poems such as Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind, Monica (about Monica from friends) and Hate have exploded on to the New Zealand literary scene. Her Twitter followers have ballooned to thousands (including the singer Lorde) and she’s had “minor British celebrities” befriend her on Facebook. The New Zealand Listener magazine called her debut an “unabashedly flamboyant collection” and Sunday magazine said it was “fearless”.

Despite the explicit, autobiographical nature of her work, in person – over drinks at the Dunedin young writer’s festival – she has an easy, understated presence, even at times a little remote, which is interesting considering she has been frequently charged with over-sharing.

The risque, confessional nature of her poetry is hard to detect in the young woman clothed in a patterned dress and leather jacket, slowly sipping a flat white and looking forward to a quiet night in her hotel room watching TV.

“Good poetry for me is hard to describe,” she wrote a few weeks earlier in an email, her preferred interview medium, “but I like poetry that feels alive, or has an energy to it, even after you’ve read it aloud 50 times, even if it sounds a little wrong somehow.

“Many people want poetry to be a streamlined vehicle for meaning, but I’m more interested in poetry that allows room for ugliness and error – I prefer that on an aesthetic level.”

Bird wrote the bulk of her book while living in New Zealand’s oldest gothic city, Dunedin – an experience she calls “strange” and her time there “great lost years”.

“I felt like I didn’t do very much in Dunedin. I just made and abandoned quilts, watched a lot of Judge Judy, had some fights, cut all my hair off, grew it back again, drove around small towns in the middle of winter and didn’t do very much writing. But I think wasted time and not working is necessary sometimes too.”

Bird still works full time at Unity Books in Wellington – she likes the job, but she also needs the money – and is, like the Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton, a graduate of Victoria University’s creative writing program.

The best thing about the course was the “paid time” it gave her to write, and the close relationships she formed with some of her classmates, both as friends and mentors. They still go out for karaoke sessions.

It was also during this year that Bird was introduced to her big, American influences – Dorothea Lasky, Chelsey Minnis and Mark Laidler – and came to realise that poetry didn’t have to be stuffy and archaic. You didn’t have to engage in endless close readings of Coleridge to be a poet.

“I’m at my worst when I’m serious, in writing and in life,” she says. “It drains all the blood out of my work. I tried for years to outrun my own jokes, to write measured and lyric work, to make my poems as pristine and elegant as possible, but they were just dead on the page.”

The tone and icepick casualness of Bird’s prose can make it seem offhand but underlying the playfulness is a focused dedication to her craft and a writing process she describes as “intensely rigorous”.

“I spent months on some of the longer poems,” she says. “I like to be flippant when it comes to writing, because I am flippant in many things, but I never want to say that I don’t work extremely hard at what I do. The mechanics involved in writing this poetry are slow and painstaking beyond belief, which perhaps explains why I don’t always write regularly or quickly.”

When Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind was published on the Spinoff website in July it received 50,000 page views, making it arguably one of the most popular poems published in New Zealand. But Bird needs more than page views to be convinced she’s made it.

“Judging poetry by page views isn’t really a good indicator of whether or not your work is any good,” she says. “I don’t think it’s proof that the work is successful but it’s proof that people are interested, which is a good start.”

• Hera Lindsay Bird is out now through Victoria University Press

• This article has been amended with a correct page view count for Bird’s poem Keats Is Dead