About the Book: To fall is to be human. We fall in love, fall asleep, and fall from grace. And in this epoch that we have called the Anthropocene, we are witnessing nothing less than the fall of nature. This extraordinary collection, the fifth by the prize-winning poet David McCooey, covers the full tragicomic spectrum of falling: from pratfalls to tragic demises, from accident-prone parents to ruinous celebrities. Within its unifying thematic focus, The Book of Falling is tonally and formally diverse, attending with great artistry to the calamities and absurdities of history and the contemporary world. The collection comprises of satires and elegies, inventive poetic autofictions and biofictions, and innovative photopoems, employing found photos and photographs by the author. This is a collection that welcomes its readers, even as it plunges them into new ways of understanding the beautiful, fallen worlds that we inhabit. About the Author: David McCooey is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Blister Pack (Salt, 2005), which won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for four other major literary awards, Outside (Salt 2010), which was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, and Star Struck (UWAP, 2016). His poetry appeared in ten of the last eleven editions of The Best Australian Poems series, and it has been widely anthologised nationally and internationally. McCooey is the deputy general editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009). He is the author of a prize-winning monograph on Australian autobiography, and numerous essays and reviews in various books, journals, and newspapers. Cover artwork: David McCooey, Collins St, Melbourne, 2022