FishWife

Alysse McCanna’s FishWife explores the multivalent definitions and concepts of “wife,” with all the historical and epistemological weight these imply. But while this interesting and worthy conceit is at the heart of her book, happily, McCanna’s intellectual considerations never undermine the poems’ visceral, emotional power, or the notable verve and swing of the book’s music and language play. Lively, intelligent, surprising, deeply felt, it’s a terrific book.

—Erin Belieu

“I want you to want/ only me.” Desire swarms in Alysse Kathleen McCanna’s FishWife. From the aftermath of divorce, to bodily encounters of “feverish tenderness,” to PTSD, to lovers drifting in and out of voice’s orbit, to the sacraments of pleasure seeping, to the “many seasons of moth,” to longing so thick the voice confesses, “I wanted/ to be a bruise/ blossoming/ like a raw/ new tattoo:/ your name/ bleeding on/ my ass,” McCanna’s poems dwell in the metaphysical and cognitive spaces of relationships occupied by the various prisms of grief and want. FishWife interrogates labels, with lines and poems that cut straight to the gut. In iterations such as, “wishwife, [       ] wife, nextwife, secondwife, tomorrowwife, never-quite-the-right-wife, kinda-whatever-afterwife, secondhand-blue, borrowed-wife, Never-wife,” FishWife explores the intricacies of brief, severing, and traumatic relationships through societal definitions—their expectations, inabilities to match emotions, etymologies, origins, and impacts on loving, craving, surviving, and selfhood. These poems are gritty and hopeful, body-full and desert-strewn, lustful and spell casting—an unmapping of the self and a luring of the voice into visibility—to be visible to the self, most of all.

—Felicia Zamora

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