The poetry of Mary O’Malley, like that of many of her contemporaries, such as Moya Cannon, Paula Meehan, and Katie Donovan, often calls upon the animal to intervene in the epistemological and mimetic crises that mark Ireland’s complex and enduringly fraught relationship to modernity. Her work demonstrates the persistence of a writing praxis typical of Irish women’s writing in English since the latter half of the nineteenth century when women in the western world began successfully agitating for equal rights in public life, including access to education and suffrage. In Ireland, where the women’s movement coincided with—sometimes in concert, sometimes in competition—the movement for Ireland’s independence, such figuration often grew from the need to re-mythologize Irish culture and history, a strategy also central to nationalist rhetoric.