FishWife

This dazzling debut by Alysse Kathleen McCanna begins with a signal: The wife is a disguise. And how FishWife goes! Across heartbreaks, stores of memory, and the terrains of pleasure, wife becomes as much lighthouse as late wife, as much siren as the coifed chorus “waiting for men to come home from wars.” McCanna transforms a word from filament to sinew, then dissipates a sonnet crown like a magician. FishWife is sensational.

—Janine Joseph