Do you have anything less domestic?
Wholesale $19.50 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9781925735406
Winner of the inaugural 5 Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry 2022
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.
Emilie Collyer lives in Naarm/Melbourne’s west, on Wurundjeri land, where she writes poetry, plays and prose. Her work mines the intersection of the personal, the existential and the socio-political and she is interested in bringing different forms into conversation with each other. Her writing has most recently been published in anthologies including House of Ideas: Modern Women (Heide & Rabbit), Not Very Quiet: The Anthology and Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry (both with Recent Work Press) and in journals Booth (USA), The Blue Nib (Ireland), The Ekphrastic Review (USA), Rabbit, Axon, TEXT, Imagined Theatres, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Overland and The Lifted Brow. She was the 2020 recipient of a Varuna Publishing Fellowship with Giramondo Publishing and recent accolades include shortlisting for Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition 2019 & 2020 and runner-up Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize 2019. Recent plays are Contest, Dream Home and The Good Girl which has been produced in New York, Hollywood and Florida. Emilie’s plays have won and been nominated for multiple awards including the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award (London), Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, Green Room Awards, George Fairfax, Patrick White and Malcolm Robertson. Emilie also works as a dramaturg and text consultant. She has a Masters in Writing for Performance from VCA and is a current PhD candidate in creative writing at RMIT where she is researching contemporary feminist writing practice. She is a member of Australian Association of Writing Programs, Asia Pacific Writers and Translators, Theatre Network Australia, Writers Victoria and Varuna Writers’ Centre Alumni.
Published by Vagabond Press, March 2022
Soft cover, 112 pages
148x210mm, upright
Wholesale $19.50 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9781925735406
Winner of the inaugural 5 Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry 2022
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.
Emilie Collyer lives in Naarm/Melbourne’s west, on Wurundjeri land, where she writes poetry, plays and prose. Her work mines the intersection of the personal, the existential and the socio-political and she is interested in bringing different forms into conversation with each other. Her writing has most recently been published in anthologies including House of Ideas: Modern Women (Heide & Rabbit), Not Very Quiet: The Anthology and Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry (both with Recent Work Press) and in journals Booth (USA), The Blue Nib (Ireland), The Ekphrastic Review (USA), Rabbit, Axon, TEXT, Imagined Theatres, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Overland and The Lifted Brow. She was the 2020 recipient of a Varuna Publishing Fellowship with Giramondo Publishing and recent accolades include shortlisting for Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition 2019 & 2020 and runner-up Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize 2019. Recent plays are Contest, Dream Home and The Good Girl which has been produced in New York, Hollywood and Florida. Emilie’s plays have won and been nominated for multiple awards including the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award (London), Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, Green Room Awards, George Fairfax, Patrick White and Malcolm Robertson. Emilie also works as a dramaturg and text consultant. She has a Masters in Writing for Performance from VCA and is a current PhD candidate in creative writing at RMIT where she is researching contemporary feminist writing practice. She is a member of Australian Association of Writing Programs, Asia Pacific Writers and Translators, Theatre Network Australia, Writers Victoria and Varuna Writers’ Centre Alumni.
Published by Vagabond Press, March 2022
Soft cover, 112 pages
148x210mm, upright
Wholesale $19.50 + GST
RRP $35.00
ISBN 9781925735406
Winner of the inaugural 5 Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry 2022
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.
Emilie Collyer lives in Naarm/Melbourne’s west, on Wurundjeri land, where she writes poetry, plays and prose. Her work mines the intersection of the personal, the existential and the socio-political and she is interested in bringing different forms into conversation with each other. Her writing has most recently been published in anthologies including House of Ideas: Modern Women (Heide & Rabbit), Not Very Quiet: The Anthology and Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry (both with Recent Work Press) and in journals Booth (USA), The Blue Nib (Ireland), The Ekphrastic Review (USA), Rabbit, Axon, TEXT, Imagined Theatres, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Overland and The Lifted Brow. She was the 2020 recipient of a Varuna Publishing Fellowship with Giramondo Publishing and recent accolades include shortlisting for Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition 2019 & 2020 and runner-up Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize 2019. Recent plays are Contest, Dream Home and The Good Girl which has been produced in New York, Hollywood and Florida. Emilie’s plays have won and been nominated for multiple awards including the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award (London), Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, Green Room Awards, George Fairfax, Patrick White and Malcolm Robertson. Emilie also works as a dramaturg and text consultant. She has a Masters in Writing for Performance from VCA and is a current PhD candidate in creative writing at RMIT where she is researching contemporary feminist writing practice. She is a member of Australian Association of Writing Programs, Asia Pacific Writers and Translators, Theatre Network Australia, Writers Victoria and Varuna Writers’ Centre Alumni.
Published by Vagabond Press, March 2022
Soft cover, 112 pages
148x210mm, upright
Praise for Do you have anything less domestic?
“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 (TEXT)
“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 (Arts Hub)
“Individual, staunch, and always engaging, Emilie Collyer’s Do you have anything less domestic? is the work of years, and its publication will bring a strong new voice into Australian poetry.”
—Lisa Gorton