Book Review: Invisible Wasp by Stephanie Powell
Some books hum beneath your skin long after you’ve put them down. Invisible Wasp doesn’t just hum — it stings. It pulses. It lays its eggs in your memory and then flutters away, leaving you to figure out what’s grown inside you.
Stephanie Powell writes in a voice that feels lived-in — not polished or performative, but raw and exquisitely constructed. These are poems that don't ask for permission. They arrive already inside you. A flicker of grief on a tram. The anatomical weight of a breast. The ritual violence of dinner with extended family. Fertility clinics, panic attacks, missed buses, moth infestations, tenderness. Powell captures the small violences of womanhood — and the ecstatic, aching beauty threaded through them — with brutal clarity and flickers of strange humour.
In Invisible Wasp, language is both weapon and wound. There are no epiphanies handed to the reader — instead, Powell trusts us to find our own discomfort and delight in the “brittleness of your own name in a surgeon’s mouth,” or the dull sensuality of folding laundry alongside a spouse in silence. Each poem feels like a doorway into a domestic uncanny: the familiar tilted just enough to expose its sharpest angles.
This collection resists neatness. It bleeds into itself. It circles around themes of fertility, desire, exhaustion, womanhood, memory — not as grand metaphors, but as lived, specific, bodily truths. It’s about what happens when you let the insects out, yes — but also what happens when they stay, invisible, gnawing at the fabric of your life.
Reading Powell’s work is like holding a mirror you didn’t ask for. You’ll want to look away. But you won’t.
At Sunday Mornings at the River, we often publish and promote voices that push the edge of language — poets who stitch myth and flesh into something new. Stephanie Powell belongs firmly in that lineage. Invisible Wasp is a collection I will return to often — not because it comforts me, but because it reminds me how much poetry can still do.
Stephanie Powell is a poet based in Naarm / Melbourne. This is her third published collection of poems. She is a recipient of the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize (2021) and the 2024 Ada Cambridge Prize, and has been published in various literary journals and prize anthologies. Order Invisible Wasp here.