FishWife

Alysse Kathleen McCanna's poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from North American Review, The Rumpus, Grist, Poet Lore, Pembroke, Harpur Palate, and other journals. Her poetry has been featured on poets.org and Verse Daily, and her reviews have appeared in American Book Review and The Operating System. FishWife, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, is her first full-length collection. FishWife was a finalist for the 2022 Barrow Street Book Prize, a semi-finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and the 2021 and 2022 Perugia Press Prizes, and made it to the top 10 in the 2022 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Alysse's chapbook Pentimento was selected by Safiya Sinclair and published by Gold Line Press in 2019. Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Vermont Studio Center, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. She is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College.

Linguistically acrobatic, FishWife interrogates dictionary definitions and the messy function of memory, reclaiming and redefining language to discover the self. This collection explores where and how embodiments of wifehood and identity overlap and entwine, alchemizing intuition into language and offering poetry as a mode of illumination. Traveling from sea to sky to earth, the speaker crosses literal and figurative borders of state lines and memory, challenging lexicography in a strange, liminal space of ghosts and grief. FishWife is a siren, a worker, a witch, a spinster, and a healer, grappling with identity, wifehood, marriage, and sometimes even fish.