Cirrus@Austlit

'You can imagine tracing the spiral on the white snail shell on the front cover of Misbah Wolf’s second poetry collection, Carapace to find yourself centred in a temporary house. Wolf’s scintillating and edgy collection of prose poems form individual houses with their fully justified box-shape with an entrance and an exit. Each house is named for their characteristics experienced subjectively by the poet, an experience of phenomena that transcends walls, closets, and beds, and rather how houses shape the inhabitants. In ‘COMMON PEOPLE HOUSE’ (p.21) the female residents transform into ‘witches’ (p.21) as they ‘tuck him (‘a man almost dead drunk’) in again, us in our dark robes/ muttering over his body and bringing water to his lips’ (p.21) in an alchemical reinvention of self.' (Introduction)

'How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is a conversation in poems about the taboo and invisible experiences of female bodies. Themes include the infertile and the aged as abject. Women's representation in literature is typically self-sacrificing with the aged and childless seen as pitiful. Collyer gives agency to alternative experiences of womanhood to disrupt women's consignment to nature as earth mother.

'This poetry-cum-memoir juxtaposes bodies with ecology and a poetics of space to represent domestic trauma and escape. Home is a frequent setting as a place to dread and ultimately escape representing family violence towards women.

'How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up was shortlisted for the eminent Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript.' (Publication summary)