Meg Eden

Meg Eden's father has worked in Japan for most of her life, so she considers Japan her second home. Her work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College and the MA program at Southern New Hampshire University. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks and the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (2017). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games. Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal

Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Relentless as the disaster itself, Eden seizes control of our deepest emotional centers, and, through insightful perspective, holds us in consideration of loss, helplessness, upheaval, and, perhaps most stirring, what to make of, and do with, survival. Her collection is also a cultural education, sure to encourage further reading and research. Drowning in the Floating World is, itself, a tsunami stone—a warning beacon to remind us to learn from disaster and, in doing so, honor all that’s lost.

Praise for Drowning in the Floating World

In Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World, the tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster is simultaneously imminent, ensuing, and already past. Its devastation is transtemporal, omnipresent, not bounded to this world. Nor is the resulting trauma, which permeates the boundaries between life and death, ocean and human civilization—as do these poems. With poignancy and lyricism, Meg Eden has written a haunting collection imbued with profound empathy. It honors those affected by 3.11 with reverence, nuance, and acuity.

—Christopher Kondrich, author of Valuing, winner of the National Poetry Series

Meg Eden’s first full-length poetry book, Drowning in the Floating World, takes its occasion from the Tōhoku tsunami that in 2011 caused catastrophic damage in northeastern Japan, killing thousands of people, displacing many more, and triggering nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, yet the poems in this ambitious collection are less about the tsunami than about its ongoing effect on those who survived. Eden approaches her subject through many different speakers, in a range of poetic styles—in form and free verse, in intimate lyrics and found text—so as a group the poems seem to ask, how can we even understand loss on such a scale? At times Eden holds out the prospect of renewal, even as her poems describe ghosts, real or imagined, and the lingering effects of the nuclear disaster. Running throughout the book is an ecological argument with implications for any reader today. A powerful, memorable debut.

—James Arthur, author of The Suicide's Son

Inhabiting the perspective of haunted people and places, of cattle abandoned in the Fukushima tsunami, of buoys arriving to the shore after being washed out to the sea for three years, the poems of Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World submerge us in loss and reckoning. “Every time / I wake from war, I wake up / wet with seawater,” one speaker warns. The dead are corporeal, cared for as though to be restored—“I brush the seaweed and trash / from her remaining hair until it’s soft”—and the poems bring the reader to homes flooded with toxins that, like memory, can only promise return. This searing collection hauntingly engages forms like the triolet, villanelle, and found-poem list to show how language can engage horrifically large, sudden environmental and ecological losses as well as the ever-changing personal landscapes of home.

—Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable, winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize

In her book of mostly dramatic monologues of victims of the 2011 tsunami in Japan, Meg Eden draws us into the immediacy of the event, with people in the water at night crying for help, there being no room left in a hospital’s third floor from which “we heard them until morning.” The enormity of what has happened calls for surrealism, and Eden answers, here with a twist of black humor as she grants flood and drought their accustomed biblical roles: “One girl gave birth to a calf / who keeps sucking on a rope / hoping milk will come out. . . . When it was born, we lapped up the blood / its mother gave. . . . What we would give for a flood!” Eden’s poems are vivid, poised, and almost as vast as the power of nature they describe in this remarkable collection.

—Elizabeth Arnold, author of Skeleton Coast