Megan Alpert
The Animal at Your Side
The narrators in The Animal at Your Side scavenge for clues, trying to stitch together a life in the midst of unrootedness. Finding bones, talismans, and half-heard voices that portal back to both personal and collective history, the speakers are haunted by diaspora, family estrangement, intergenerational trauma, and resilience. What are the costs of being far away from a homeplace? What are the costs of returning? And when the costs are too high on both sides, how do you choose? Grieving the loss of family of origin, and longing to return, the narrators forge new shapes, grounded in a connection to the natural world, ultimately making a home in their own unsettled natures. These poems play with form and structure, ranging from tightly-wound lyrics to detailed reportage. Alpert uses white space and invents forms as needed, creating sunken stanzas and a poem shaped like a rib cage. By turns gritty, frank, and devotional, The Animal at Your Side finds things to be treasured in weirdness, queerness, the ecstatic, and the erotic. It is a book for anyone who has ever been lost, who has waited for what seemed like too long "for the voices/to filter back".
Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-1-950404-05-6
Paperback: $16
Publication date: September 1, 2020
Megan Alpert grew up in the suburbs of New York City and has since lived in St. Paul, Seattle, Boston, Washington, DC, and Quito, Ecuador. She is the recipient of an Orlando Poetry Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Studios at MASS MoCA, and the Marquette Chamber Residency. As a journalist, Alpert has received fellowships from Foreign Policy and the International Women's Media Foundation. She has worked as a sandwich maker, bookseller, child caregiver, ESL teacher, journalist, and editor.
Praise for The Animal at Your Side
"How does one survive the loss of a sister, the loss of everyone in the family besides the animals? Megan Alpert’s gorgeous new collection, The Animal at Your Side, is at once surreal and filled with the flora and fauna of a strangling world, where the speaker takes us with her along a path lined with feathers and bones. With an unnamed war in the background, ancestors waiting in the trees, everyone gone, everyone dead, we must find comfort in what still moves, even when it could be dangerous. In this troubled landscape, this ghosted familial place, the predators, the wolf, the coyote all roam free, and you, along with the speaker, become “the animal at your side.” The poems in this collection are spare, stripped down to their eeriest knife-edge. These poems “unhome” and unhinge, and I am enchanted with this haunting."
—Jenn Givhan, author of Rosa’s Einstein and Girl with Death Mask
"The Animal at Your Side spans worlds—Eastern Europe, China, Ecuador, folktale and myth—all of these worlds equally sinister and haunting. In poems where we feel "the whirr-click of war beginning..." the poet learns that the best way to survive is to become "the same color as rocks, water,/anything I walked past,/see-through". This is Megan Alpert's gift to us—radical empathy—so we can shape-shift through these worlds as she has. This is a collection I'll read time and again, and I know I will grow with each reading."
—Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask
Excerpt from The Animal at Your Side
Dawn
My sister comes home
smelling of dirt she was buried in,
dandelion milk under her nails.
We wash her arms,
scrub her fingers
with stinging soap,
but still she is not clean.
When she finally speaks,
it’s hand me that trowel
and I’ll bury the seeds
while upstairs our grandmother
paces the attic.
Will I wake anywhere
besides this house,
or love anyone ever
beyond my sister
with the skinned knees?
I wake again in the garden
crushing stems against my teeth.