An Inventory of Abandoned Things

In Kelly Ann Jacobson’s An Inventory of Abandoned Things, winner of the 2020 Split/Lip Press Fiction Chapbook Contest, there are cockroaches in the walls and anoles trapped in the doors. Squirrels roll across the attic rafters, and red ants patrol the car floor. A lazy gopher tortoise chews lettuce in the neighbor’s butterfly garden. At once the story of a pregnant graduate student separated from her wife and an inventory of the Florida panhandle, this book of linked stories questions what it means to fight the land for a place in it-and whether, in the fighting, there can be a bond between human and landscape formed that is stronger than love.