Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama

Shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award

From the author of Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life comes a collection of prose poems which explore the relationship between thinking patterns and ill health. Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is published alongside a new edition of Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s acclaimed 2014 debut, Autobiography of a Marguerite. View a special offer on both books.

What are the appropriate emotions. Even with a map, it was difficult to determine. An ache which means let go. If she didn’t have the thought, she wouldn’t have the feeling.

Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a collection that invites the reader to consider the relationship between internalised beliefs and the development of illness, drawing on psychology texts and the language of self-help. Wheels fall off to create drama. Through wordplay, aphorism and inversion, these poems unfold and rebound to create a collage of melancholy and comic transformations. One thing leads to a mother. In their exploration of character traits and dramatic tropes, they resist fixed meanings, inviting the reader to reflect on their own experiences.

SHORTLISTED: Queensland Literary Awards – Judith Wright Calanthe Award 2026

The voice at the core of this collection of prose poems is unique and striking. This is a book that warrants rereading: its phrases appear and reappear in ever more inventive ways as the poet adopts intricate and unpredictable patterns that are variously bleak, witty, playful and eerie.
Judges’ comments, Queensland Literary Awards

These poems are compressed and layered like paper folded to its tightest square. Here is an exquisite restraint that feels almost brutal, that always manages to surprise. This book has a rare force.
Sholto Buck

Butcher-McGunnigle transforms malady into force; a leaf in a whirlwind, splitting memory from frame…this collection forms a prelude to her stunning body of work.
Autumn Royal

Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a prequel to Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s catalogue, one that enriches all you’ve read from her before. Bleakness and a light touch. It all comes back. I read it in one sitting and it felt like being spelled.
Hollen Singleton

Stylistically, Butcher-McGunnigle consistently operates in a logic that is singularly hers… There is something incredibly powerful about a work that forces you to slow down and circle the same old bruise.
Maliyah Arnold, Honi Soit

Praise for Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle:

Full of moments that, to me, are perfect…consummately whole, exactly right, every element in glowering harmony, as densely fixed as a neutron star.
Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Sydney Review of Books

Butcher-McGunnigle is compulsively readable, hilarious, wonderful – a master of the whiplash turn, the dark plunge.
Ashleigh Young