'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'How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up was shortlisted for the eminent Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript.'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)
'Western Australian poet Lisa Collyer’s debut collection is challenging, confronting and exquisitely crafted. She addresses feminist concerns in poems about ageing, beauty and desire as well as speaking the unspeakable in autobiographical poems about living with the limitations of the female body. Infertility, childlessness, termination, domestic violence and sexual assault are front of mind in Collyer’s work but she also tackles environmental concerns — female bodies and the plight of the planet are linked by themes of grief and a race against time.' (Introduction)
'A debut collection of poetry that breaks down taboos about the state of women’s bodies and the state of the planet.'
'A debut collection of poetry that breaks down taboos about the state of women’s bodies and the state of the planet.'
'Western Australian poet Lisa Collyer’s debut collection is challenging, confronting and exquisitely crafted. She addresses feminist concerns in poems about ageing, beauty and desire as well as speaking the unspeakable in autobiographical poems about living with the limitations of the female body. Infertility, childlessness, termination, domestic violence and sexual assault are front of mind in Collyer’s work but she also tackles environmental concerns — female bodies and the plight of the planet are linked by themes of grief and a race against time.' (Introduction)
