Insistent Animals

Abstract

Insistent Animals is a poetry collection that explores the susceptibility of the body. The collection follows depictions of the speaker's rural upbringing, interactions with her estranged family, romantic and physical entanglements, and aspects of the speaker's fraught relationship to her own desires and needs. In this collection the speaker engages not only with the specificities and ramifications of place, and people in such places, but also herself as a site for happenings. There is an understanding across poems that time is not linear, and that events echo backwards and forwards in memory and upon the body. Ultimately, the speaker is concerned with what it means to be tied to others, and how such ties can be both unbreakable and untenable.