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David McCooey - The Book of Falling

A Local Word Poetry Book Launch event

To fall is to be human. We fall in love, fall asleep, and fall from grace.

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. 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.

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). David lives and works on Wadawurrung tabayl in Geelong. 

David will appear in-conversation with Gregory Day, writer and musician living on Wadawurrung tabayl in the Eastern Otways region of Victoria, Australia. Gregory has published five novels to date and has won many awards, including the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. In 2019 Gregory’s most recent novel A Sand Archive was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2020 Gregory received the Patrick White Award for his ongoing body of work, and in 2021 he was awarded the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize for his essay The Watergaw. Gregory’s first book of essays, Words Are Eagles: Selected Writings on the Nature and Language of Place was published in 2022 and his new novel The Bell of the World will be in bookstores in March 2023.

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