Like a Girl on a Page

Like a Girl on a Page is a collection of poems born out of the grief of losing a young person to suicide. There is no conventional narrative here, no path to resolution, but because O’Heare’s poems are presented in the chronological order in which they were written, they do ‘track’ changing emotional responses to loss. Living inside suicide’s aftershocks is a hard topic, sometimes dealt with in how-to guides and memoirs. Like a Girl on a Page is neither of those things. At its heart it is a personal lament, but it is also a unique exploration of an exquisitely painful social issue that Australian society is starting to realise must be dealt with openly.