Megan Alpert is the author of The Animal at Your Side (Airlie Press 2020), the winner of the Airlie Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Muzzle, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Review, and many others. 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, she has reported for The Guardian, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic, and received a fellowship from the International Women's Media Foundation.

Other poems by Megan Alpert in Verse Daily:
November 4, 2020:   "The Year With No Address" "A train, trees, houses. Where..."
September 9, 2020:   "Unsignified" "There's part of me that isn't a girl..."

Books by Megan Alpert:

Other poems on the web by Megan Alpert:
Two poems
Two poems
Two poems
"After, Before"
"Caught"

Megan Alpert's Website.

Megan Alpert on Twitter.

About The Animal at Your Side:

"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

"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."
—Jennifer Givhan