30 Under 30 2/30: Megan Falley

‘my father could have been a traveling salesmans. i could have been born at any doorstep.’
-from new york craigslist > personals > missed connections>

Heaven must be missing an angel, because Megan Falley is somewhere plucking his feathers and writing poems with them. Oh, the ink? Her own blood. Ok, that image might be intense, but that is the intensity this daughter (metaphorical folks) of Sexton and Ginsberg brings to the page. Her work is dazzled by images so sweetly sinister and raw it will make you wanna sing and shutter all at once (click on the link above to see what she does with candy).  Megan is a storm in a sundress and we will deal with it. Her poems are rich with lightning and the spells that conjure it. Speaking of spells, have you read After The Witch Hunt yet? In her debut poetry collection, Megan proves that she is here to stay, and that her voice, power, love, strength, and skill will not be ignored. The poems in that being of strange, hot magic that we will concede to calling a book, each poem demands we pay attention, that we come to it gentle and allow it to muscle us. Literally, I put the book down and I had to run around my house a little y’all, if only to remember freedom as Megan so masterfully made me do. I have never seen her write, but I imagine that doors unlock, windows unhinge, bars turn to wind and chains slip into dust. The poems in After The Witch Hunt and a lot of the work I’ve read and heard elsewhere from Megan are a fierce attempt at freedom (from self, from danger, from sorrow, from pain, from what must be fled), and the urgency of those poems makes my heart throw itself into the walls of my chest, trying to break out and meet the soul that has made it flutter so. Well, Heart, meet Megan Falley. Reader (for you are my heart), if you don’t already know, meet light. 


-Danez Smith

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