Keira Clementine Partners with All-Woman Creative Team for Debut Collection. It Might Make Her Poetry’s Next It Girl.

BY ZARA BLACKWELL · AUGUST 2025

The Aussie poet is soft-spoken, dewy-eyed, and unafraid to make lusty female hunger the centre of her tender, devastating world.

Keira Clementine, with her glossy black locks and grey eyes, is the picture of lo-fi intensity — a writer who looks more like a dreamy anime heroine than a cloistered academic. But this reformed English major (she graduated with a BA in Communications from Monash University) loves pop music just as much as she adores poetry, and the combination is nothing short of intoxicating.

"I've always been drawn to musicians who pen their own music, but not the indie dudes male reviewers obsess over," she muses, curled up in her Brisbane apartment surrounded by out-of-print poetry collections and trailing plants. "I have only ever truly loved female writers. There's something absolutely dreamy about a writer who knows how to have a good time. Most of us are miserable drunks who consume far too much coffee and far too much chocolate."

Though many are curious about Clementine's influences, she insists she pulls inspiration from Rosé and Sabrina Carpenter just as she does literary giants Mary Oliver and Wendy Cope, explaining that her creative process is driven as much by melody as well as verse. "I definitely love songwriters as much as poets. Any writer who can capture a feeling or explore raw self-expression gives me such a giddy, almost sacred vibe."

Sacred is perhaps the perfect word for her debut poetry collection, which trades in quiet revelations rather than spectacle, and somehow lands harder because of its woozy intimacy. In “Even My Hunger,” one of the collection's early standouts, Clementine masterfully sketches the distance between two boyfriends: the first rushing through her affection like it was an inconvenience, the second pressing a warm speckled egg into her palm as if it were the most natural gesture in the world. The detail is impossibly small, but its resonance is immediate and devastating. A gesture as modest as handing someone an egg becomes undeniable proof of love expansive enough to hold not just tenderness, but hunger too.

What makes her debut extraordinary isn't just the work itself — though the poems are devastating in their intimacy and stark in their crystalline clarity — but the revolutionary fact that this collection was shaped entirely by women. From the earliest, most vulnerable edits with editor Maya Wheeler to the iconic pink cover crafted by visionary designer Sophie Knox, Clementine entrusted her most sacred vision to an all-female creative collective.

"I've always been inspired by how fellow Aussies Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie make it an absolute priority to collaborate with female directors," Clementine explains, her voice soft. "It wasn't something that just happened organically. I made it a deliberate point to work exclusively with women. I wanted to create this dreamy pixel cottagecore universe for my entire aesthetic. A completely safe space. A fun, nostalgic, feminine world."

The texture of Clementine's writing — plainspoken yet cutting, melancholy without melodrama — means she never overdoes her imagery into metaphorical fireworks; instead, she lets her visuals linger, syrupy and unshowy, until their quiet genius becomes absolutely undeniable.

With a debut this singular and profound, it feels less like ambition and more like shimmering inevitability that Clementine will find the devoted audience she deserves. Poetry doesn't often crown an it-girl, but watching Clementine weave her pixel cottagecore spell, it's impossible to imagine her as anything else.