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Sometimes a poet's voice seems to land with a satisfying thump, fully formed. Charlotte Guest's is one such voice. Her elegant, tender and surprising lyrics are tuned, in her words, to 'invisible forces'. Her learning, worn light, makes the suburban world strange and familiar all at once. Investigating in her debut Soap 'the lodgings at the end of girlhood' with both wit and heart-aching ambivalence, Guest is one to watch.
Lucy Dougan
These are clear-eyed poems, both tough and tender. Guest casts dappled light across the everyday.
Emily Stewart
The weight of our bodies, the heat of them; the thick waist of history; and the crush of possible futures, these poems reside on the lip of contemporary womanhood.
Soap is the debut collection of Western Australian poet Charlotte Guest.
Charlotte Guest is a writer and bookseller based in Geelong, Australia. Her fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in national literary magazines and have been shortlisted for multiple prizes. The manuscript for her debut novel, The Kookaburra, won a major Australian prize in early 2026.
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