Book launch | Asterion by Amy Crutchfield

Join award-winning poet Amy Crutchfield to celebrate the launch of her new book, Asterion.

Asterion is Amy Crutchfield’s first collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2024 with The Cyprian. Deriving its title from the original name of the Minotaur, a hybrid figure both human and monstrous, the work explores the often painful truths at the core of our personalities. Using fragmentary and epigrammatic forms as well as mythic retellings and narrative sequences, this is a book of love and longing, containing an appetite for knowledge and a disposition to wonder.

Join us to celebrate this brilliant work on Tuesday 1 December at Butler’s Lane in Melbourne. Crutchfield will be joined by actor, director and executive director of Bell Shakespeare, James Evans. The evening will feature poetry readings and conversation, with light refreshments provided. Copies of Asterion and The Cyprian will be available for purchase on the night through Readings Books. 

Doors open at 6pm for a 6.30pm start.

Please RSVP via this page before 14 November. We hope to see you there.

Praise for Asterion:

‘One of the most thrilling volumes of Australian poetry I’ve read in many years. Taking the much-maligned figure of the minotaur as her guiding avatar, Crutchfield navigates the labyrinths of intimacy, violence, suffering, ageing and other transformations with rare intensity and control. In spare, minimalist lines that are deeply concerned with and driven by images, the poet overturns received perspectives, finding fresh lines of sight on both the mythic and the quotidian… Asterion is a masterful and daring work, one of rare intellectual and emotional intensity; as the poet says, “Damage is part of it. / And we touch anyway”.’
– Sarah Holland-Batt 

‘Asterion is the kind of book that expands in the mind long after reading. Shuttling seamlessly between antiquity and the present day, these poems range from compressed, epigrammatic gems to expansive, discursive swoops that catch life’s mysteries in sidelong visions. Crutchfield’s affinity with beings on the edge – whether in classical myth, corporate law, or palliative care – sees Asterion beautifully capture what it means to be a creature of desire, “indentured to appetite.” It takes a certain maturity to treat poetry as something “semi-precious,” whose treasures come qualified, but that is exactly what these poems do, and they are all the more striking for it.’
– Jaya Savige

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