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.

The Australian/New Zealand edition of Fallen was published by Sydney-based poetry publisher Pitt Street Poetry and is available from the publisher and from poetry-loving bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fallen in the media

 

Molloy writes inside a recognisable lineage: the American body lyric of Sharon Olds and Marie Howe, where the erotic and the anatomical are allowed to occupy the same line; the sanctified domestic poem of Adrienne Rich and Linda Pastan, where kitchens, children, and marital beds carry philosophical weight; and the erotic theology of popular song – Leonard Cohen especially – where sex is braided with doubt, ritual, and God. These traditions are audible throughout Fallen: the body opened, the house maintained, the song replayed as a form of secular prayer. Molloy does not disavow these inheritances, but neither does she genuflect before them. Her poems remember their heat yet keep to a cooler register, where wanting is always weighed against what it might burn down.

– from Damage into song; poetry of the erotic and the domestic, Bronwyn Lea, Australian Book Review, March 2026

 

With Fallen Audrey Molloy has taken on a difficult challenge and brought it off almost perfectly. We are certainly wiser for having read it.

– Geoff Page in Quadrant, April 2026

 

Molloy’s weapons are humour and a fine precision.

– Martina Evans reviews Fallen, Irish Times, December 2025

 

What makes a good person? Can a good person leave a spouse who is also a good person? Can a person who has chosen self over others ever redeem themselves? And should they need to? Is it a given, if they break a vow, that they are immoral? How long does a bad person need to be punished for? These are some of the questions that Fallen grapples with. But at the heart of the collection is a love story.

– from What does it mean to be a fallen woman? Audrey Molloy, Irish Times, October 2025

 

Poems

‘Cold Water Swimming in Lyme Regis’, first published in Island Magazine 

‘Faith, or a Walking Palm’, first published in the Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology, 2024

‘Redemption, Redleaf Pool’, first published in Live Encounters