With its stark and enigmatic movements, The Animal at Your Side by Megan Alpert brings to mind a black-and-white horror film. There are clues everywhere. There are bones and frantic impulses to dig in earth or bury the truth. Trouble gets under fingernails. People and things die. And are reborn. Skulls are uncovered.

Many of these elements come together in the prose poem, “Crafting”:

Take the glove that got left in the river. Your own sadness, snap it open in the basement in the yellow lights. The table littered with feathers, bones. Feet shuffle upstairs, stomp, then rest. Your work is laid out before you, and almost enough time.

In these poems, dangers are revealed almost casually, even suicide or rape or hair ripped from a child’s scalp; but nothing is taken lightly. What could happen is always understood to have already happened, or is about to happen. The “I” may be the narrator or a persona. Tensions are not always explicated; they appear to arrive from the poet’s unconscious awareness of how the sweet and bitter pieces of a life might be forced to fit together. This is seen in the prose poem, “Island,” where nearly every sentence reverses a prior image:

Her soft breath on my face. Smelled like waste. My back would heal and she would nurse. My nipples still blue when the sound of the ocean stopped. Sometimes the trees bend toward me and I’ll feel something like it. Or taste it just before. The gold dripping off the leaves, just before it sweetens and betrays.

The poem “Holly: 1962” is an exemplar of how the disjointed narrative in so many of these poems undoubtedly have a reference event—it just might not be what you expect. The poem is eulogized “After Bridget Potter,” and when I googled the autobiographical account of Potter’s abortion, I shuddered. Suffice it to say the phrase coat hanger. The poem incorporates details of Potter’s own account:

I lie on my back and listen for the scraping
I am author to.
Weeks of crying at my desk, a douche with soap,
running up and down
the stairs, the bath and gin, a visit to the witch with a folding table.

The poems are situated in landscapes, in sections titled, “Trails,” “Shores,” “Interiors,” “Out Further,” and “Ways in the Dark.” “Trails,” is full of wolves and dead bodies. The poem, “What We Kept,” describes the inability, common to all of us, of freeing ourselves from the past. In Alpert’s voice, war is the most apt metaphor for the past:

We kept the war under our tongues
kept in in our hamstrings
in our bones.
We kept the war in our cereal bowls
in our juice
kept it in our first love
standing in the porch light
waiting to be kissed.

The sections, “Interiors,” and “Out Further,” include poems that show camaraderie, even love. “Runaways, Apartment,” declares, “There was nothing / that did not make us laugh.” And in “Blind and Delighted,” is this peaceful domestic scene:

She looked at
me said    let’s take a walk   I wanted to go
back to bed   so we did

Interpretation is the gift of the reader and Alpert offers much opportunity for interpretive reading. The poem “My Theology,” from the final section of the book, inhabits a personal act of interpretation:

My body was trying
to get itself back
into the silver-white
bucking through the woods—
before skin, pink
nipples, patch
of matted black hair,
back into the wild
thing with one sharp horn—
while under you, the body
you were holding
(the real thing, whatever that was)
groaned and rose.

I pondered the book’s title, as one must. It is found it in the last stanza of the last poem in the book:

you go on
            from there   the animal
at your side

There is a strong sense of the natural world throughout these poems, and the idea of a totem comes to mind with its title, offering the message of resilience, of having come through a dark place not entirely alone. I can only impart a flavor of where these poems will take the reader. Alpert’s voice is unique—both disturbing and lyrical. Lyricism in the face of so much complexity and struggle gives us a brilliant rumination on the existential loneliness that we all experience.