Alumna Carly Inghram ‘18 Publishes ‘The Animal Indoors,’ Winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize

By
Rebecca Pinwei Tseng
September 24, 2021

The Animal Indoors by alumna Carly Inghram ’18 will be released by Autumn House Press on September 29, 2021. The collection of poems was selected by Terrance Hayes as the winner of the 2020 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) Book Prize, and was also the July 2021 selection for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club.

The Animal Indoors, Inghram’s second book, explores the daily life of a Black queer woman in a world bombarded by mass-consumerism, white supremacy, and sexism. The poems critique the homogenization of American culture and consider what safe spaces exist for Black women, as the speaker seeks to keep the interior safe from the chaos outside. Terrance Hayes writes of the collection: "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."

Donika Kelly also praises the book, writing in a review, “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.”

book cover

In an interview with Poetry student Tiffany Troy for Lit Pub, Inghram speaks to the process of creation as a poet. Inghram states, “We can use things in the material world in order to find [the] beautiful, or insert word there or insert object of desire there. Longing, craving, etc. I think we can use physical things in the world to create what is being longed for. The process of making is a very wonderful process, allowing us to create new landscapes and new places that we’ve been wanting.”

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