Wives are afraid of me now.

From the opening line of Fallen there is a sense of danger and intimacy. In her latest and most risqué collection Audrey Molloy asks: What makes a good person? What does it mean to be a fallen woman? And can she ever redeem herself?

You are one side of an abyss.
Everything decent, the other.

 

Expanding its vision to track the fallen woman through history, religion and myth, Fallen offers better endings for some of the tragic heroines of novel and opera for whom Audrey Molloy speaks. While the poems mine the exquisite pain, joy and persistent guilt of an illicit love affair, and expose post-separation social opprobrium, at the core of this collection is the most tender of love stories.

And then a skylight opened for each of us.

 

Fallen is available from The Gallery Press and good bookshops and was officially launched in Wexford and Dublin in November 2025.

An Australian/New Zealand edition of Fallen is also available from Sydney-based poetry publisher Pitt Street Poetry and from poetry-loving bookshops.

The Sydney launch of Fallen is planned for February 2026 – details posted here soon!

 

 

 

 

 

Fallen in the media

What does it mean to be a fallen woman? Essay, by Audrey Molloy, in the Irish Times, October 2025

 

Molloy’s weapons are humour and a fine precision.

– Martina Evans reviews Fallen in The Irish Times