Overview

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 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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9781949467789

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Reviews

Hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous, The Necessity of Wildfire is a book that creates a humming musicality out of the early sorrows and rough stones of life. Cinematic and sound-driven, these are brilliant and honest personal poems that open up to the larger universal truths. These poems are gorgeous and complex. -Ada Limon, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things

Hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous, The Necessity of Wildfire is a book that creates a humming musicality out of the early sorrows and rough stones of life. Cinematic and sound-driven, these are brilliant and honest personal poems that open up to the larger universal truths. These poems are gorgeous and complex. -Ada Limon, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things Early in Caitlin Scarano's The Necessity of Wildfire, she writes, 'But to name/ a thing is a trick.' Rather than deal in definitive statements about familial trauma and environmental disease, Scarano skillfully weaves in and out, upside down and sideways, for what ironically becomes a more accurate picture of our world. Post-confessional as their diaries of 'useless locks, secrets no one wants to hear,' these stunning poems refuse to be pinned down into a neat narrative arc, characters neither redeemed nor condemned. -Denise Duhamel, Second Story

Author Information

Originally from Southside Virginia, Caitlin Scarano (she/they) is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They were selected as a participant in the NSF’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program and spent November 2018 in McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Her debut collection of poems is Do Not Bring Him Water. Her work has appeared in Granta, Entropy, Carve, and Colorado Review. You can find them at caitlinscarano.com.

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