Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama

by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

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

Genres: Poetry

58 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 31, 2026

About the author

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle is the author of Autobiography of a Marguerite (Hue & Cry Press, 2014; Giramondo Publishing, 2026) Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life (Giramondo Publishing, 2021) and Leaves Fall Off To Create Drama (Giramondo Publishing 2026). Originally from Auckland, NZ, she currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Reviews

[liv turko]

This was quite a challenging, but intriguing read! Not only because these poems are structured in blocks of texts which experimentally change the subject and flow each sentence, but in the way that this structure creates a reading experience that captures the dissonance of the ideas explored within them. Who are we in relation to time, our memories, relationships and mechanical actions we make to live our daily lives? In this selection, Butcher-McGunnigle writes from the mind of someone outside their body and time, but if the mind is constantly changing and in each moment and movement of our body, we become something else, then how can we truly perceive ourselves? Or are we only a single thought racing to the next in an endless sea of flimsy outcomes? Then how much of our monotonous actions are contextualised by ourselves to create meaning or purpose? Although leaves fall from a tree without inherent meaning, our perception of them falling becomes an idea in our mind. ‘The only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought’.

[Chris Holdaway]

This is probably ZBM’s best book overall. It makes sense that it was written before the other two, even though published later, as you can clearly see the germ of both here.

The language in ‘Leaves’ is challenging and abstract, with repetitions that seem like partial quotes from other texts. ‘Autobiography of a Marguerite’ takes this complexity to the extreme with its footnotes and material drawn from various sources. ‘Leaves’ is still challenging and interesting but structurally and visually more fluid as a reading experience.

It also has the language of fevered mental malaise that gets turned up to 11 in ‘Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life’, but through the abstraction it’s not quite as oversharing.

This book is a balance of tightly crafted and slippery. For readers who might find the extreme structure or content of ZBM’s others a little alienating, I think this one shows the author’s power and capability in a very refined way.

[Chris Benetti]

Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama is an inventive and wonderfully unpredictable collection that turns language itself into a playground for exploring psychology, emotion, and the strange connections between our inner and outer lives. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle uses wordplay, inversions, aphorisms, and shifting perspectives to create poems that can be melancholy, funny, unsettling, and thought-provoking all at once. I especially enjoyed how the collection resists simple interpretations, encouraging readers to bring their own experiences to the work. Brief but remarkably rich, these prose poems linger because they make familiar ideas feel suddenly unfamiliar.

[Kelly]

I don’t mind the meaning of poetry being ambiguous and I sometimes enjoy wordplay and precise language choices too… but this was trying too hard to be clever and obscure, to the point of just being pretentious. The author note at the back of the book indicates that the poems were written back in 2011 when the poet was at uni, being influenced by a teacher passionate about experimental form, and that context explains a lot. Maybe there’s an audience for this type of poetry, but I imagine it’s quite niche if so. Not for me.

[Alice Adlide]

Really nice to sit in and with

[Isabel Greenslade]

Writing to stew in