The Necessity of Wildfire: Poems

by Caitlin Scarano

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949467796
Publisher:	Blair
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

The houses where they eat the lambs 1

Every disaster branches out from another 3

Calf 4

During the Wildfires 5

Song Dogs 7

Nights like these I think of my sisters 9

Partition 11

Unvigil 13

In which I dream I am my grandfather 15

Not the ending (that came much later) but when we knew it was over 17

On his deathbed, my father, who I haven't seen in ten years, offers me homemade moonshine 19

They Named You Patriarch 21

Wellspring 23

Buttercream 25

Leveret at Laughing Jaw 27

Parameters 29

Deer Season 30

Fast Beauty 33

I know we're all sick of poems with deer but let me explain 36

Lady of the Shovel 40

Some thoughts on the one who said I expected too much 42

Not how the silo stood but what it was after the fire 44

A Poem to Multiple Men 47

God's Country 49

Spur 51

Your grandfather killed a deer, my grandfather killed a deer 53

Oxbow 55

Diobsud Creek Pack 57

Daughter Knot 58

Ember 59

Droplet 61

Lion's Mane 62

In retrospect, I dream of our wedding 64

When you first ask if we can have a child 66

A rewriting of our last goodbye 69

Bald Eagle on Blue Stones 71

After the horses are gone 72

A Litany of Dreams You May Borrow 73

Acknowledgments 77

Editorial 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 Limón, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things

WINNER of Pacific Northwest Book Award for Poetry, "The poems in Caitlin Scarano’s The Necessity of Wildfire burn slowly but searing, her words lulling readers into a sense of comfort in the exploration of the minutiae of everyday life only to be suddenly startled into a higher clarity. The collection is complex and compelling, revealing a connection to both the personal and universal experience. These poems make an impact upon first reading and will affect you each and every time you return."—Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association

"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

“In Caitlin Scarano’s stunning collection The Necessity of Wildfire, we look directly at a world that has been harmed and try to understand how we survive. Evocative, meaningful, musical, and fierce, these poems are unwavering in their consideration of loss, grief, generational trauma, and the violence of personal histories and in the natural world. The Necessity of Wildfire questions, who is predator and who is prey? It holds history accountable and finds its power to reclaim—‘don’t let / that pinprick hole in your chest / grow to swallow you . . . Girl, be the flame / who leaps the highest.’ Yes, there is both beauty and pain, heartbreak and healing where sometimes what we do is hope for a ‘winter without an underside of bruises.’ The Necessity of Wildfire is a remarkable collection of poems you will not forget; these poems and this voice is uniquely and unapologetically her own. A compelling and gorgeous book you will return to again and again.”—Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides

From the Publisher