In this debut collection, Ontario poet Vera Hadzic explores themes of anxiety, eating, excretion, compulsion, and change. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery follows the construction and deconstruction of the body, both human and animal. These poems take the form of travel poetry, ekphrasis, and narrative to navigate personal and public history, and personal and public constructions of self and time. Drawing on history, art, and literature, the poems in this collection strive to mediate the inside and the outside of the self, probing at the anxious impulses to contain oneself and, at the same time, break open.