Distributed by YesYes Books and Asterism
Cover Art: George Stubbs
Interior and Exterior Design: Katie Prince
$22 | 98 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-18-9
Poetry l Perfectbound | December 1, 2026
“Weaving gracefully between racetrack & bedroom, this radiant sophomore collection traces the velvet of a horse’s nose & the sting of a lover’s slap with the same meticulous hand. ALYDAR unfolds as a layered collage of relational & animal abuse, where the body & the page are marked by rupture, hunger, & return. What emerges is a courageous reckoning with the damages we endure in service of desire, a refusal to be bridled or broken cleanly.”
—Topaz Winters, author of So, Stranger & Portrait of My Body as a
Crime I’m Still Committing
Alydar
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About the Book
On the night of November 15, 1990, a champion racehorse named Alydar inexplicably shattered his leg while alone in his stall. Two days later, he was dead. His death, believed by some to be a tragic accident and by others to be a horse-murder for hire, led to the full payout of a $40 million insurance policy.
Jill Mceldowney’s second poetry collection revisits this haunting mystery through epistolary love poems addressed to Alydar. Blending noir-landscape imagery across the mythos and pageantry of horse racing, Mceldowney’s poems explore the lines between devotion and doubt, tenderness and obsession, and ask how much damage two people are willing to endure under the guise of love.
ALYDAR is simultaneously an elegy, an investigation, a nightmare, a love letter, and a collection about the stories we tell ourselves in the aftermath of violence.
About the Author
JILL MCELDOWNEY is the author of the full-length collections ALYDAR (YesYes Books 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is a founder and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published work can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.
