**Shortlisted, Queensland Literary Awards 2026, Judith Wright Calanthe Award**

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.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is a collection of prose poems that invites the reader to consider the relationships between internalised beliefs and the development of illness, drawing on psychology texts and the language of self-help, and the exploration of character traits and dramatic tropes. Wheels fall off to create drama. Through shifting frames of reference, wordplay, aphorism, and inversions, the poems reform, unfold and rebound to create a collage of melancholy and comic transformations. One thing leads to a mother. Butcher-McGunnigle's poems explore the relationship between unexamined subconscious thinking and physical and mental health, resisting singular, fixed meanings and inviting the reader to reflect on their own experiences.

Praise for Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life:

'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