The Animal Indoors

by Carly Inghram Narrated by Carly Inghram

Overview

The Animal Indoors, winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Terrance Hayes, traces the experience of a Black queer woman as she seeks refuge from an unsafe world.

Carly Inghram's debut collection explores the day-to-day experiences of a Black queer woman who is ceaselessly bombarded with images of mass consumerism, white supremacy, and sexism, and who is forced, often reluctantly, back indoors and away from this outside chaos. The poems in The Animal Indoors seek to understand and define the boundaries between our inside and outside lives, critiquing the homogenization and increasing insincerity of American culture and considering what safe spaces exist for Black women. The speaker in these poems seeks refuge, working to keep the interior safe until we can reckon with the world outside until the speaker is able to "unleash the indoor news onto the unclean water elsewhere."

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"In The Animal Indoors interior and exterior worlds blend with lyricism like 'the sudden violence of dry earth rising up in rain.' These poems sing as they please of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Frank Ocean, and America’s 'edges flittering in the small light.' Melancholy and joy overlap, clap, and slap. The Animal Indoors is full of acts of love and creation. What a capacious, capricious new book." —Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

"The Animal Indoors crowds the threshold of knowing and transformation, 'fully awake now, / looking straight into the heart / of spring.' Where once yard and its 'good bones,' now the closed door; where once the cage, now a 'voice, a clearing.' These poems sow the unexpected and bloom with unease." —Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations

Terrance Hayes

In The Animal Indoors interior and exterior worlds blend with lyricism like ‘the sudden violence of dry earth rising up in rain.’ These poems sing as they please of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Frank Ocean, and America’s ‘edges flittering in the small light.’ Melancholy and joy overlap, clap and slap. The Animal Indoors is full of capacious, capricious edges. This poet straddles worlds. This is a dynamic debut.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940195166403
Publisher:	Autumn House Press
Publication date:	09/20/2025
Series:	CAAPP Book Prize
Edition description:	Unabridged

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