Lit Blue Sky Falling

THE BOOK: Lit Blue Sky Falling

PUBLISHED IN: 2019

THE AUTHOR: Meg Files

THE PUBLISHER: Finishing Line Press

SUMMARY: From the Galapagos Islands to Iceland to a retirement village barber shop, the poems in this chapbook mingle natural history, memory, and reflections on mortality. They conjure blue-footed boobies, wildfire, coral-adorned underwater sculpture, a post-election Fourth of July, the aurora borealis. They explore life with twin sisters, the enduring presence of the dead, the way wars cascade through lives, the making and meaning of art, and earthly love.

THE BACK STORY: Sorting through my poems published since my first poetry book, I wanted to collect my favorites. The first third of the book is poems about the Galapagos Islands, and the last third is about a sisters’ trip to Iceland. The middle section is my favorite assorted poems. So the book has been years in the making but a couple of months in the assembling.

WHY THIS TITLE: “Lit Blue Sky Falling” is the title of one of the poems in the book that seems as close to a personal philosophy as I have written. It starts with an epigraph from Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress: “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT: Readers will explore the flora, fauna, history, and experiences of virtual travel to the Galapagos Islands and Iceland. They can enjoy touches of humor — life with twin sisters, an elegant white combover in a barbershop for seniors, anxious dogs wearing Thundershirts on the first Fourth of July after the 2016 election. They can witness and perhaps share the ways of grief, of love, of war, of our awareness of mortality, of wonder — with both accessibility and subtlety, I hope, and with freshness.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

In Lit Blue Sky Falling, Meg Files is as precise a naturalist as Darwin, whose journey to the Galapagos she retraces in the splendid opening poems. Files’ verse is alive to the poignant changes since Darwin’s time. Tourists now wear “i love boobies” tee-shirts but are shocked to find real boobies dead on the trail—“survival of the fittest” in action, as Files dryly observes. The fate of the last Isla Pinta tortoise, who refuses to mate with a female from a subspecies, is “finally to crawl back alone / beneath the cradle of the earth. The end.” The volume closes movingly with a different kind of journey, one to the far north (Iceland) as Files grieves her father, who recently died. What she discovers is not only the fatalism inherent in the Norse sagas and its people, but also their reverence for earth’s beauty, what she gorgeously describes as the still presence to “green glory.” —Cynthia Hogue

In these poems Meg Files expertly guides us on an exotic journey where on the outer landscape we’ll meet blue-footed boobies, eagle rays, elephant grass and Northern lights; but also on an inner exploration where we find fear, age, love and loss, and wisdom in abundance. These poems are rich with sharply observed details and delicately captured emotion. “Lit Blue Sky” is a terrific trip. — Peter Meinke

In Lit Blue Sky Falling, Meg Files illuminates the origin and evolution of the complex connections among all living beings. From the Galapagos to Iceland, she follows tracks and sagas to let us all comprehend how we are related—among species, within families, and as part of cherished friendships. These elegant, earthy poems reward each reading with insight, wisdom, and delicious language. — Peggy Shumaker

AUTHOR PROFILE: Meg Files is the author of the novels Meridian 144 and The Third Law of Motion, Home Is the Hunter and Other Stories, The Love Hunter and Other Poems, Writing What You Know, a book about taking risks with writing, and a poetry chapbook, Lit Blue Sky Falling. Her novella, A Hollow, Muscular Organ, is forthcoming from Accents Publishing. She edited Lasting: Poems on Aging. Her stories and poems have appeared in publications including Fiction, Writers’ Forum, Oxford Magazine, The Tampa Review, Miramar, and Crazyhorse. She has been a Bread Loaf fellow and the James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at The Ohio State University. She has taught creative writing at colleges and universities, including Pima College, where she directed the Pima Writers’ Workshop. She directs the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and Masters Workshop.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: I speak at writers’ conferences and teach at writers’ workshops. I enjoy doing readings and visiting writers’ groups. I’ve postponed the writers’ workshop I was planning for this fall in the south of France until 2021 and organizing the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and Masters Workshop for March 2021.

SAMPLE POEM: Here’s one of my favorites from the chapbook:

INDEPENDENCE DAY 2017

All across the country, dogs are wearing anxiety

wrap Thundershirts and being misted and massaged

with Canine Calm. Across the west, men are wary

of their grills. Seedless personal watermelons,

nervously purchased too soon, have gone punk.

My father, who used to take his three little girls

to the stadium for the intemperate rite of fireworks,

ground and sky, died uncounted on election day.

My husband wears his flag-striped superhero tee-shirt

from Universal Studios. My nod is a blue shirt and red

earrings unseen beneath my hair. Well, and the underpants

are white. Tonight we two will have our burgers, comfort

the pup, sit on the front step to catch the distant fireworks,

and clink our Coronas to each other. These—amidst the noise

and the fire—are our small rituals. Hold me, Captain America.

LOCAL OUTLETS: Antigone Books, Tucson AZ, 520-792-3715, info@antigonebooks.com. Order for curbside pickup in Tucson.

WHERE TO BUY IT:

• Finishing Line Press: finishinglinepress.com

• Amazon

PRICE: $14.99

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

megfiles.com

megfiles@earthlink.n