- English
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About this book
Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, Caitlin Scarano’s collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality.
The Necessity of Wildfire 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.”
Scarano’s imagination is galvanized by the South where she grew up and by the Pacific Northwest where she now resides—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 their family, the death of their estranged father, the unraveling of long-term relationships, the complexity of their sexuality, and the 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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The houses where they eat the lambs
- Every disaster branches out from another
- Calf
- During the Wildfires
- Song Dogs
- Nights like these I think of my sisters
- Partition
- Unvigil
- In which I dream I am my grandfather
- Not the ending (that came much later) but when we knew it was over
- On his deathbed, my father, who I haven’t seen in ten years, offers me homemade moonshine
- They Named You Patriarch
- Wellspring
- Buttercream
- Leveret at Laughing Jaw
- Parameters
- Deer Season
- Fast Beauty
- I know we’re all sick of poems with deer but let me explain
- Lady of the Shovel
- Some thoughts on the one who said I expected too much
- Not how the silo stood but what it was after the fire
- A Poem to Multiple Men
- God’s Country
- Spur
- Your grandfather killed a deer, my grandfather killed a deer
- Oxbow
- Diobsud Creek Pack
- Daughter Knot
- Ember
- Droplet
- Lion’s Mane
- In retrospect, I dream of our wedding
- When you first ask if we can have a child
- A rewriting of our last goodbye
- Bald Eagle on Blue Stones
- After the horses are gone
- A Litany of Dreams You May Borrow
- Acknowledgments