Winner of the Airlie Prize

The Animal at Your Side

“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. 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.”

–Jennifer 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, finalist for the Oregon Book Award