Caitlin Scarano

Winner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by final judge Ada Limón, Caitlin Scarano's second full-length collection is The Necessity of Wildfire. It begins, "To not harm / each other is not enough. I want to love you / so much that you have no before." These poems chase a singular, thorny question: how does where and who we came from shape who and how we love? Judge Ada Limón says the resulting collection is "hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous." Though originally from the South, Scarano's imagination is galvanized by the Pacific Northwest--floods and wildfires, the Salish Sea and the North Cascades, and the humans and animals whose lives intersect and collide there. In this collection, Scarano reckons with a legacy of violence on both sides of her family, the death of her estranged father, the unraveling of two long-term relationships, the complexity of sexuality, and her decision not to have children. With fierce lyricality, these poems--"stories without monsters, / stories without morals"--resist both redemption and blame, yet call in mercy.

Poems

The Necessity of Wildfire

The Salt and Shadow Coiled

Caitlin Scarano's debut poetry collection, Do Not Bring Him Water, begins, 'as a child you don't ask yourself why you're hiding, / you just hide.' These poems bear witness to domestic trauma and the many forms it can take. In this collection, women escape knots of fishing wire, secret rooms behind radiator grates, hammers to the skull, vegetable gardens, howling houses, chains and chairs. Scarano orchestrates a strange, lyrical world where the lines between human/animal, male/female, past/future, guilt/innocence, and waking/dreaming blur with both visceral pleasure and danger. We are led through this world by a speaker who is attempting to both acknowledge and disrupt a history of violence and silence. Yes, perhaps 'no one is made / for anyone, ' but love can still engender from loss

Do Not Bring Him Water

Pitcher of Cream is the winner of The Conium Review 2015 Flash Fiction Contest, judged by Laura Ellen Joyce. It was subsequently selected for inclusion in the Queen's Ferry Press anthology The Best Small Fictions 2016 by guest editor Stuart Dybek. This micro-chapbook was distributed at the 2016 AWP Conference in Los Angeles, CA. Only fifty copies were produced, and each was signed and numbered.

Pitcher of Cream

Caitlin Scarano's debut poetry collection, Do Not Bring Him Water, begins, 'as a child you don't ask yourself why you're hiding, / you just hide.' These poems bear witness to domestic trauma and the many forms it can take. In this collection, women escape knots of fishing wire, secret rooms behind radiator grates, hammers to the skull, vegetable gardens, howling houses, chains and chairs. Scarano orchestrates a strange, lyrical world where the lines between human/animal, male/female, past/future, guilt/innocence, and waking/dreaming blur with both visceral pleasure and danger. We are led through this world by a speaker who is attempting to both acknowledge and disrupt a history of violence and silence. Yes, perhaps 'no one is made / for anyone,' but love can still engender from loss.

Caitlin Scarano

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