Self-Animal Inventory

Abigail Kirby Conklin’s Self-Animal Inventory, a collection of vignettes about relationships and New York City, is part of our 2025 in-house chapbook series.

Get Your Copy!#

The book is available on Amazon.

Library Donations#

One of our goals for our books is to promote poetry literacy by placing copies of our books with libraries wherever we can.

Why not buy a copy to donate?

After you’re done reading the book, just drop it off at your local public, university, or high school library, then email us at info@ogre.red with the name and location of the library. We’ll credit you as a sponsor here on this page.

Reviews#

Abigail Kirby Conklin is tapped into the soul of my being. The heartbreak is palpable, and the words that she’s using to stitch her heart back together are right here on the page.

TK Dutes

In Conklin’s Self-Animal Inventory, the poems deliver their promise: lists that take stock of desire, the animal-ness of our bodies, ways we survive their permeability, but also move past survival to find their possible goodness. She writes the “whale language of choosing you/again/again/again” to her beloved across time; she also writes how her “sky blooms against/the wreckage” and of survivor’s guilt. With references as far-ranging as Princess Mononoke and the story of Noah’s ark, the inventory sutures the fantasies of living with the fleshy truths of being alive. Self-Animal Inventory gives us a wrenching array of poems that can take you both into and past yourself in a single afternoon of reading, which we can only hope good poems will do.

C. R. Grimmer

In Self-Animal Inventory, Conklin cuts with desire and laughs as she presses the wound. With blood and joy, hunger and bone, she celebrates drama in the mundane and exposes the depth of the hidden mind. As always, her visceral rawness and black humor captivates.

Jessica Oesterle

Self-Animal Inventory is a collection that seems to embrace sexuality in a candid, upfront way, but Abigail Kirby Conklin can never help showing us the dark underbelly of the warring needs of both the body and the heart.

JC Reilly

Review Copies#

To review the book for your publication or blog, please email us at info@ogre.red and we’d be happy to send along a free PDF review copy.

About the Author#

Abigail Kirby Conklin is a New Yorker with roots in the DMV and the state of Michigan. Currently based in Toronto, Kirby Conklin is an educator and advocate who specializes in decolonial and anti-racist approaches to learning.

We previously published Abigail’s poetry in Issue Twenty-Two, February 2024 and Issue Fifteen, December 2022.

More Books#

Want more? Find a full list of our books here.