The Sky Will Overtake You: Poems

by Marcia Falk

Overview

The poems in The Sky Will Overtake You abound in a rare, infectious, and hard-won ecstasy, the consequence-at least in part-of exquisite attention to whatever they approach. They celebrate "the days laid out like jewels / on a merchant's table" even as they acknowledge grief and loss and the knowledge that "[There is] no keeping anything." These poems make ephemerality palpable, establishing it as an essential feature of what we treasure. "What Do You Have?" asks a poem's title. Its final lines respond, "Only this bit of time, / like clouds unforming- / even as you point to it, // gone."

-JACQUELINE OSHEROW, author of Divine Ratios

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781734531381
Publisher:	Scarlet Tanager Books
Publication date:	05/19/2025
Pages:	102
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.24(d)

About the Author

Marcia Falk is widely known in the progressive Jewish world for her poetic re-creations of Hebrew and English prayer. Her translation of the biblical Song of Songs is considered a modern classic. In addition to her books of poetry, she has published book-length translations of modern Hebrew and Yiddish women poets. A lifelong artist, Marcia began art classes as a child at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later studied painting at the Art Students League, where she is a Life Member. Her pastel drawing appears on the cover of The Sky Will Overtake You. More of her art, as well as excerpts from her books, can be viewed at marciafalk.com. Marcia grew up in metropolitan New York and now lives in northern California with her spouse, poet Steve Rood. Their son, Abraham Gilead Falk-Rood, teaches English and music to immigrant teenagers in a public high school.

Editorial Reviews

2025-03-24
A contemplative poetry collection about human emotion and natural wonders.

Falk explores themes of transience, memory, and grief in this book of poems rooted in nature. In the opening entry, the speaker’s muse informs her that she is unnecessary because the sky is a “stunning event” whose ever-changing inspiration is more powerful than imagination. In “It,” the poet describes a fleeting but blissful moment of nothingness, “the mind gently sweeping thought away / until the window is blank” before life’s noise rushes in again. As “Morning” dawns, the speaker admires the sunrise, determined to love her life despite regrets. In “Geranium,” she contemplates the flower’s “hot eye, / which glares back at you like fire.” A “Summer Storm” batters a garden, and the speaker wonders why some blooms survived while the peonies succumbed to the downpour. A bird careening into a window serves as an “Awakening.” Memories of childhood difficulties creep into some of the poems: “The Walls of My House” recalls tension between a girl and her mother, juxtaposed with a neighbor in a coma whose daughter waits at her bedside for “a half-spoken word, / any blessing or curse.” “What Kept Me Standing” recounts a father hitting his 13-year-old daughter so hard she bleeds all over her hot-pink sneakers. “Enduring” reassures readers that sorrow “will retreat” and that time “wrestles down grief,” allowing one to “re-emerge, whole and cleansed.” The final poem, “Open Gate,” invites readers “to begin again.” Falk plumbs the depths of emotional and ecological truths with these sparse but insightful verses. The poet captures the holiness of nature, from “falling petal, wind-lifted leaf, / shift of shadow on grass” to the healing, grounding powers of a “lush, chaotic” garden. Her words paint stunning portraits as she describes “The laden arms of the oak, the elm, / and the agitated hunger of the small jays, // the fat globes of white sugarmum / where bees suck love.” However, the poems may be too abstract and removed for readers who prefer a more direct approach.

A luminous poetry collection that may be too open-ended for some readers.

Kirkus Reviews