Our Animal hybridizes novel flaking into poetic forms like a gnat swarm, magnetic filings, or migratory flux. It’s a fierce inquiry into Othering, tracking Kafka’s life through his deep identification with animals, especially those hunted or outcast. Graphically complex with metamorphic text layers, the chapters shape-shift in relation to crows, dragonflies, a frog; there are deer, swallows, a goldfinch, humans, a hybrid Beast, wolf, Insekt, a small unidentified animal in its burrow. We are entangled in biography as biology— paradisiacal transfiguration that leaves out no being.

Our Animal is the winner of the 2014 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest, selected by Mary Jo Bang.