"This essential and captivating debut, How To Dress A Fish, will draw readers into intersections of history, memory, exile and return. Abigail Chabitnoy's poems are tender and direct–they restore worlds, mend fragmented histories by revealing our human longing for land and for memories embraced in language."–Sherwin Bitsui, author of Shapeshift and Flood Song
"How to Dress a Fish is a stunning investigation of archive, loss, and kinship. These poems linger in histories erased by US colonialism–not toward recovery, but to study those modalities of mourning, attachment, and invention through which living proceeds nonetheless."–Matt Hooley, Assistant Professor of English, Clemson University
"Never before have readers been of a mind to apprehend such prodigious poems. Determined by the wealth and control of their poet's language and the most profound respect for the powers of history, this work insists upon the necessity of poetry. Poems like these change the world, connecting us to each other and all else that sustains life. Herein, the lyric bones are barbed and all the crafts: laden. Not in division, but through the responsibility and gifts of this most crucial poet: Abigail Chabitnoy. With her poems, together we may, as real people, spring from and return to the islands, the sea, and the ice with utmost elegance. Traveling together, and most attentive to our context."–Joan Kane, 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry
