The Beasts by Meg Files

In this incredible chapbook, Meg Files‘ poems sing us goodbye. As humans take their leave from this planet by ordinary death, the animals remain. Meg Files’ unpretentious Beasts will not miss us but perhaps they’ll note us as beautifully as she has noted them. In these straightforward, penetrating poems, we can take some solid satisfaction knowing the beasts keep the humans alive and significant a little longer.

–Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

Meg Files is a modern-day mystic. How else to explain the alchemy here, of words into music, of what we call “human” (CVS and a good shit; Tupperware, Tchaikovsky; YouTube and parking lots; our existential wildfires; all our bullet points and obituaries…) into something much bigger and more beastly than that? Saint Francis of Assisi had his sermons for birds. In our strange and uncertain times, Meg Files has given us, wingless animals that we are, these poems. Thank heavens.

–TJ Beitelman, author of This Is the Story of His Life

“We forget we are/ animals here inside…We/ fools in sweatpants have forgotten that we are animals.” Forgetting is a dangerous pastime for the human species, yet the poems in “The Beasts” show us worlds where our animality becomes undeniable. Steeped in grief, in “mutual need” of humans to animals as animals, our estrangement to other creatures, the death of beloveds who go “before” us and continue to visit in dreams, and in a newly formed “desert” of a future that feels both unrecognizable and unexplainably possible, these prose poems expand in the surreal, the tantalizingly strange, where Files asks us to look, then relook, then not look away. When the world turns upside down, when things become “razor thin,” these poems expose and contemplate who the animals—the beasts in costume—truly are now.

–Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones