The Fallow by Megan Neville

Sometimes you open a book of poems, and a poet dazzles you so much that you find yourself anxiously turning pages to read her every word—these are the poems of Megan Neville’s debut collection, The Fallow. Engaging, smart, written with wit and craft, each page is a cathedral of surprise—from named rocks that live in a dollhouse to trying to guess a dead father’s password to being in a school lockdown with a student asking if we’ve always done this. Neville’s entrancing poems are innovative and edgy, personal and political, fierce and feminist; this is a voice who will rewrite the dictionary & gift it to everyone they love. In a world where the flowers lost their edges and skyscrapers don’t apologize, these poems made me feel alive. If Neville’s poems don’t move you and make you want to write poems yourself, you may want to check in with your soul. This book is stunning and I did not want it to end—Neville captivates from beginning word to magnificent last lines. Highly recommend for every bookshelf.

~ Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)


I love this book. How it invites you into intimate spaces of body and family with self-effacing humor and chatty charm. How its poem titles tantalize you with messy human struggles you can’t turn away from, like “& I Cringe Every Time I Hear the Word Womb” or “On Trying to Guess My Newly-Dead Father’s Computer Password.” I love how once inside these poems, you start to hear the fierce interrogations of injustice, especially the ways male power victimizes women with brutal violence or systems of biological control. How the speaker keeps reinventing weapons to fight back and tools to reclaim herself, from historical truth-telling to magic healing spells to self-portraits liberated from shame. I love how the poems arrange themselves into dazzling constructions, each one chiseled or sewn or riveted with expert precision, whether hardened into symmetrical stanzas or scattered across the page like windblown seeds. Through Megan Neville’s deft and agile imagination, The Fallow accumulates a juggernaut force, epic scope, and orchestral complexity. Everyone should read it.

--Steve Healey, 2021 Trio Award Judge & author of Safe Houses I Have Known


In The Fallow, grief is a comet blistering the lens, "a fuzz of light" slowly coming into focus that the speaker waits for like "the second / coming of a god I could / lick & grab." In plaintive elegies like "The Night My Father Died, I Almost Believed in God," we see a speaker trying to reconcile her experience of loss as irrevocable and harrowing with the knowledge that death is also unbearably ordinary: "now he's up / on the mantle charred crumbs in a vase." These frank and compelling meditations on violence, grief, and womanhood reflect on the fragility of life and the knowledge that for every protection spell there is also the risk of destruction. Part incantation, part elegy, part self-portrait, these poems form a radiant constellation of stars that "turn inside out & light into lead."

- Emily Skaja, author of Brute and winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets