The Animal Indoors

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."