A Hollow Muscular Organ

Poetry February 2022 ISBN 978-1-936628-88-9 Softcover, 5" x 7"

In this psychologically complex and linguistically sophisticated love story, A Hollow Muscular Organ by Meg Files immerses the reader in the process of dissolution of a long and loving marriage.

"A Hollow Muscular Organ combines the intimacy of a two-person play with the insight of a wry all-seeing observer. The alchemy that results is magical. Meg Files's remarkable gifts—she has published both fiction and poetry in a long and distinguished career—are in full bloom here. She renders a lively, headlong story of marital infidelity and its aftermath so fully and deeply that we come to know her characters as we know our life-long friends."—Ann Harleman, author of Tell me, Signora, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award

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What Others Say

A Hollow Muscular Organ is a bittersweet, cannily precise anatomy of a love story—a meditation on connection and disconnection, and on writing itself, for the self, as connection and retrieval. Meg Files' riveting, wise novel, the story of Susannah and Griff, is unputdownable for its intelligence and its heart. I read it in one sitting and so will you.

— Karen Brennan , author of Television, a memoir

Meg Files fills A Hollow Muscular Organ with electricity—these pages thrum with pain and humor and life, charged with insight about love and aging and mortality and deeply human folly. A profound meditation on both marriage and narrative; a novella that packs a stunning, seismic punch.

— Gayle Brandeis , author of The Art of Misdiagnosis

Files constructs flawless, sure-footed sentences—and peeking in the windows at this kind of dirty realism turned me into a happy voyeur.

— Joshua Mohr , author of Model Citizen

A Hollow Muscular Organ combines the intimacy of a two-person play with the insight of a wry all-seeing observer. The alchemy that results is magical. Meg Files's remarkable gifts—she has published both fiction and poetry in a long and distinguished career—are in full bloom here. She renders a lively, headlong story of marital infidelity and its aftermath so fully and deeply that we come to know her characters as we know our life-long friends. Sad and funny, wise and sensuous, Files's telling makes their struggles illuminate our own.

— Ann Harleman , author of Tell me, Signora, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award

About the Author

Meg Files

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. 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.