Bridget Gilmartin’s debut poetry collection Strange Animals is an exploration of the self, of identity and emotion, and the shifting nature of all these things. It seats the reader right in the centre of these constructs; curious, open and abundant. What pervades the collection is an elated revelation in testing the borders of these constructs, in forming alternative ways of inhabiting the body and the world. This revelation happens both in scenes of solitude, and in intimate moments between lovers, both platonic and romantic; there is a coming to know oneself and one’s own desires in the presence of another. This is a book of queer history as it happens, of bodies brimming, saying to us “look what we are doing, how wonderful and bizarre.” The collection seeks to put forth and celebrate the strangeness of what we all are: confused, desiring, ugly, beautiful, strange animals.