About the Book

Carly Inghram’s poems explore 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.”

Praise for The Animal Indoors 

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

Carly Inghram is a poet from Atlanta. She received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work is featured in The Indianapolis Review, Prelude, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Sometimes the Blue Trees, was released from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2019. She currently lives in Manhattan and teaches Kindergarten in the Bronx.

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