Airlie Press Catalog
Megan Alpert/The Animal at Your Side
$15.99
$15.99
Category: Airlie Press Catalog
Experience the heartfelt storytelling of Megan Alpert in *The Animal at Your Side*. This compelling collection of poetry explores emotional connections and offers insightful perspectives on the human experience. A profound and evocative read, it invites readers to reflect and connect on a deeper level.
About the Book:
Winner of the Airlie Award
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".
About the Author:
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.
$15.99 total
You Might Also Like
More items in Airlie Press Catalog
