Emilie Collyer, Do you have anything less domestic?

WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL 5 ISLANDS POETRY PRIZE FOR A FIRST BOOK OF POETRY 2022

‘What sets the winning book apart is its depth of effects and the frequency of astonishing, breathtaking turns, insights, and denouements...Do You Have Anything Less Domestic? demonstrates that the best personal writing illuminates a more universal experience.’ 5 Islands Judges’ report

'Do you have anything less domestic? may be a debut, but Emilie Collyer is no debutante. She is an award-winning playwright of international renown. And although this is her first poetry collection, Collyer is a long established, much loved and highly regarded voice in the Melbourne poetry scene, and her poems have been widely anthologised. As Lisa Gorton observes in her endorsement, ‘this is the work of years’. Indeed, those years are keenly felt – in the honed poetic craft as well as the weight of grief accrued by a woman navigating midlife, a woman who unwittingly finds herself ‘the adult in this house’ (p.19) and wonders if life might have anything more alluring on offer.' Bronwyn Lovell in TEXT

Navigating the world, inheriting the gender of woman, feeling more or less comfortable with that, trying to find the ways in which the word is inhabited and where it slips away; wondering where the domestic bleeds into the public; whose place is where and what are the rules? These questions form the basis of Do you have anything less domestic? The poems within whisper quietly behind closed doors at night; take trips out into daily life with a sharp eye and worried tongue; tease at generalities and assumptions about what a woman’s body of work is, what it does, how it looks, reads and feels. The collection is structured into five sections that each take one of these utterances as their heading (each said to or about the author at one time): Do you have anything less domestic; Don’t write about your family, nobody cares; It's important to keep up weight bearing exercise; You have a nice smile, you should use it more; I hope I won’t put anyone off by saying this is genuinely feminist work. The poems move from the intimate and domestic, through family and social themed works, and out to broader themed pieces that are overtly feminist in how they interrogate language, content and form.

'Collyer explores the nexus between the public and the private in this witty and provocative collection of poetry that moves from the familial sphere to the world at large. It’s an acerbic, playful and feminist book.' Thuy On in Arts Hub.

Emilie Collyer, Do you have anything less domestic?
2022. 148mm x 210mm. 112pp. 
ISBN 978-1-925735-40-6
Release date: March 2022

Cover image © Daisy Noyes, 2020. Burning Bush.
https://daisynoyes.com