“When the thing left for dead rises and walks, what is the map she leaves?” a voice asks, the question in parentheses, pointing to the crux of the matter: The Animal at Your Side (Airlie Press, 2020) by Megan Alpert is a travelogue of the soul that begins, as all journeys or epic quests, with a departure. Here, in the first poem “Dawn”, the departure is the death of a sister: “My sister comes home / smelling of dirt she was buried in, / dandelion milk under her nails.”

Alpert anchors this first poem with concrete details like, “my sister / with the skinned knees,” then leaps into a surreal world of the imagination with, “I wake again in the garden / crushing stems against my teeth.” Her voice is steady, as plain-spoken, stark and honest as William Stafford, and she shares both his connection to the natural world and a uniquely American ancestry or a uniquely American concern for ancestry, the ghosts we’re haunted by.  

There is in bereavement not just a sense of loss but of lost. In her poem, “What Lost Was Like,” we are at the point of no return, leaving home, an American legend, and our way through The Animal at Your Side will carry us wayward far from New York City to Xi’an. 

We travel, passing through homes, homeless, as in “A Year With No Address”. But in this vagabondage we are not alone. Whether the animal at our side is the gift of our own animality, the ghost of a sibling, one or another of our homosocial bonds, friends, or the dog we stay home with in our hands (“he smells of kippers, wet branches”) may be for the reader to decide, but connections abound here, assurances, companions.

December 2020