The Book of Falling

The Book of Falling circles around a thematic focus of falling—falling in love, falling from grace, and exploring fallen worlds in an age marked by calamity.

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 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.