How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up
How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is a debut poetry collection by Western Australian poet Lisa Collyer that maps the terrain of the female body - its desires, its failures, its survival. Shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award in 2022, this collection moves across continents and decades, weaving together the personal and the political with unsettling precision.
At its heart is a speaker navigating infertility, cultural dislocation, and the relentless demands placed on women's bodies - from the women who squeeze her breasts to measure her remaining fertility on a Malaysian street, to the beauty police who legislate her hair, weight, and age. Collyer writes of pregnancy loss, sexual violence, caregiving, chronic illness, and the quiet erosions of self that accumulate across a woman's life. Yet this is not a passive collection: it bites back.
Drawing on ekphrasis, found text, and dramatic monologue, Collyer ranges from the intimate (a spouse reduced to a carer, desire lost to catheters and guilt) to the broadly political (a sonnet sequence on the "impossible jeans" rape trial ruling; a found poem constructed from rape apologist language). Her poems venture from Christmas Island to Malaysia and Vietnam, through suburban Perth shopping centres, country roadhouses, and aged care facilities, finding in each location new sites where women's autonomy is contested and reclaimed.
Published by Gazebo Books, with poems previously appearing in Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, Meniscus Literary Journal, Rabbit, and the Australian Poetry Anthology, this is a collection of startling formal range and emotional courage - one that asks, always, what it costs a woman to be seen.
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