Acknowledgments; Contents; One; Today the Horse; Not by Extraordinary Means; First Engagement; Dear One; Flight Path; A Life; Horses in Brooklyn; Pacifisms; Two; On the Prospect of Heaven; Inchworm; Sweet Girl; Saints and Martyrs; Lives of the Artists; Home Economics; Flood Zone; Here; Three; Homing; Four; Puff; Dante Park; Narcissus; Ghost Horse; This Neighborhood; Driving Alone; Upon Giving My Grandmother's Chair to My Brother; Trick of the Light; Zalar's Carousel Horses; Five; Market Day; Nocturne; Last Light; Diameter; Intensity as Violist; Farmer's Daughter; Wishing Stones; Notes
Summary
In Animal Purpose, Michelle Y. Burke explores the lives of men and women as they stand poised between the desire to love and the compulsion to harm. In one poem, a woman teaches a farmhand the proper way to slaughter a truckload of chickens
