Spotlight on “Bone | Fish | Girl” by Megan Alyse

About Bone | Fish | Girl

A bold collage of tenderness and ferocity that examines an inner and outer world through the lens of a speaker whose journey is nonlinear. Layered with humor, grit, and a unique vulnerability, Megan Alyse’s debut collection explores heartbreak, motherhood, polyamory, queerness, identity, and complexity of the self as an artist. 

Alyse navigates interpersonal relationships, dreams, and memories using poetry to craft a coming-of-age story told in retrospect. Anchored in themes of love, empathy, and redemption, the stark honesty of Bone | Fish | Girl is something only encountered through the authenticity of the human experience.

Praise for Bone | Fish | Girl

From Airea D. Matthews, Author of Bread and Circus 

“Alyse’s Bone|Fish|Girl is at once a lyrical delight and full circle affirmation that the future and the past are liberatory temporalities, which, in their collision, usher in the fluorescent possibility of the present. This collection, an evolutionary ancestor to Sexton and Plath, makes readers aware of the importance of viewing one’s life as a critical archive of culture, religion, personal ethics, and emotional landscape. 

“Alyse disposes of the convenience of binaried concepts—such as good and bad, light and dark, wrong and right—and presents, instead, a complex self willing to live in the fullness of their vulnerable truths, willing to grapple with their own self-limiting stories wrought in the wake of a traumatic past. 

“On these pages is an incredibly sharp and skillful writer capable of materially self-ordering her life to be who she chooses to be. This book is one of the finest examples of poetry’s power to craft circumstance into epiphanic transformation and turn what some view as ash into beauty.”

From Jason Schneiderman, Author of Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire

“Megan Alyse’s Bone | Fish| Girl is a stunningly confident poetic debut. Frank in its eroticism and forthright about the fragility of human bodies, this collection carries the reader through extreme joys and intense agonies, while limning the somatic seams that hold pain and pleasure in an unbreakable helix. 

“In the tradition of Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and Rachel Zucker, Alyse refuses to hold anything back, breaking the dam of decorum to let the truth overflow, especially when it threatens to overwhelm in its overflowing. 

“That Alyse has survived what happens in these poems is a testament to her grit and determination; that Alyse has been able to write so beautifully about what she has survived is a testament to the power of art. Bone | Fish| Girl is a haunting book, one that you’ll find yourself taking off the shelf again and again.”

From Margaret Ray, Author of Good Grief, the Ground

“These poems speak to their reader like an old friend, pulling us closer in the smoky corner of a crowded room, accusation and mischief in their eyes. From the opening poem’s unequivocal announcement of this voice’s vitality, line lengths expand and contract across this collection like breath. 

“Attentive to sound (listen for the quiet, slant rhymes near the ends of poems), here is the confessional mode turned toward queer delight, danger, resilience, motherhood’s ambivalence and gravity, and one of the best curse-poems I’ve read in a while.

“Bone | Fish | Girl is cigarillos, polaroids, microwave burritos, mothers, blood, teeth, tragedy, and hard-won survival in the poet’s native Utah. These poems hold deep grief, but also overflow with an insistence on living: ‘We lost our minds and opened summer watermelons / with only our hands.’ Does it get any better than that?”

From Sebastian Merrill, Author of GHOST :: SEEDS 

“Megan Alyse’s thrilling debut collection Bone | Fish | Girl is unflinching in its exploration of sexuality, motherhood, and violence. Moving through memory, dreams, and possible futures, the fierce and audacious speaker of these poems is willing to ‘hold the heads of all things you’re too afraid to touch.’ 

“Taking us on a journey that encompasses anger, grief, and desire, Bone | Fish | Girl offers no simple stories or easy answers: ‘after all that went on,’ the speaker asks in a later poem, ‘you actually think this is a story / about falling in love?’ 

“Formally masterful, unabashedly queer, and downright sexy, this collection shows us what it means to be alive.”

From Christine Kitano, Author of Sky Country

“Megan Alyse writes, ‘Tell me of a loaded gun, loam, casket, formaldehyde– / how uncomfortable it is loving me as intensely as you do.’ Every poem in this collection ripples with this bold and daring energy. The strong narrative pulse in these poems allows Alyse to tackle the big subjects–love and desire, awe and shame–but these are never mere philosophical musings. Instead, the stakes in these poems are made real by the raw honesty and intensity of Alyse’s captivating voice.”

About Megan Alyse, Author of Bone | Fish | Girl

Megan Alyse is a Savannah-based writer from Northern Utah. She first earned her BA in Creative Writing from Weber State University where she served as the Editor-in-Chief of Metaphor Literary Journal. She then earned her MFA from The Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Megan’s work has appeared in publications such as Atlanta Review, Atticus Review, Leon Literary Review, The Florida Review, Juked, Rattle, The Rumpus, and more. Bone | Fish | Girl is her debut poetry collection.

You can connect with Megan on her website, or on Instagram.