Gold Digger

Gold Digger is the bold second collection from Perth poet Lisa Collyer, published by Life Before Man (Gazebo Books). Building on the acclaimed How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023, shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award), this collection of formally daring poems traverses female experience across generations - from grape picking and gold prospecting to the switchboard, the factory floor, the barmaid's bar, the seamstress's atelier, and the corridors of Parliament House.

Across five sections, Collyer maps the interpellations of womanhood through a wide-ranging series of intertextual encounters: found poems, ekphrastic works, and poems in dialogue with Hardy, Austen, Bront«, Plath, Irigaray, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Barbie, and the Barham menu from a 2013 Queensland LNP fundraiser. The collection is both literary and visceral, unsparing in its examination of domestic violence, precarious employment, ageing, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. The title poem shortlisted poem 'The Grape Picker[s]' was shortlisted for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2025.

At once battle-hardy and playful, scholarly and street-smart, Gold Digger is a poetry collection that demands to be read aloud - and refuses to be quiet.