The Only Animal Awake in the House, runner-up in Moonstone Press’s

2021 Annual Chapbook Contest, is available here. 

The Only Animal Awake in the House brims with revolutionary leaps of imagination & embodiment. What is human flows into other forms of matter: mud, simple vertebrates, supernovas. Kristen Holt-Browning proposes her motherhood as the source of a porosity that thins the border between her life & ‘the life next to this one’. Here is a consciousness & a language unfettered enough to envision its progression from a ‘prehistoric ocean . . . growing lives for firmer land’ to ‘highly evolved creatures [who] shed our skins’. Here is a voice that speaks life whole. —J. C. Todd, judge, 2021 Moonstone Chapbook Contest

“I live with boys & dogs. It’s pretty filthy.” With these authoritative & unsentimental lines, Kristen Holt-Browning, in her debut collection, begins an ever-deepening exploration of the terrain of motherhood in apocalyptic times. To become a mother, Holt-Browning reveals, is to become feral—& to become feral is not merely to become wild, but, more significantly, to make repeated transit from the domestic to the wild & back again. Through Holt-Browning’s gorgeous & surprising poems we experience nocturnal prowl & transformation, the “archaic premonitions” that haunt her. Holt-Browning delivers no polemic: rather, we are given the shedding of skin, the acquisition of claws & fur, followed by repeated & bittersweet return to the domestic world of “peanut butter & Play-Doh.” As the book progresses, “galactic scatter” & “mutual gravity” weigh heavily. A fierce protectiveness governs the speaker’s engagement with her children & with all living things in the endangered world. This book is beautiful, original & wise. —Ruth Danon, poet (Turn Up the Heat, Word Has It, Limitless Tiny Boat)