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 from 1 October 2025 and will be officially launched in Wexford and Dublin in early November.

 

An Australian/New Zealand edition of Fallen is available from Sydney-based poetry publisher Pitt Street Poetry and from poetry-loving bookshops from mid-October 2025.

A Sydney launch is planned for early 2026.

 

 

 

 

Fallen in the media

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