Poetry. THE HATCHET AND THE HAMMER is part long poem, part essay in fragments, about real and imagined violence. In this chapbook, the writer looks back at three intersecting traumas--the unraveling of a long-term relationship with a partner with a diagnosis of Harm OCD, the death of her father due to prolonged alcoholism, and a story she learns of how her grandfather once attacked her grandmother with a hammer. Here, the writer attempts to make meaning from trauma and interrogate her own role in these fractured relationships. The chapbook takes a layered, polyvocal approach by collaging lines from poets, medical research, and other found texts. At the heart of this project, driving it like an engine, is a central question--how do I know when I have the truth about myself?"In a deeply felt and carefully braided mix of personal history, poetic reference, and psychological research, THE HATCHET AND THE HAMMER is an intensely lyrical examination of violence--violence as old as the hills, and violence as new as the pharmaceuticals taken to counteract it. The work here is fearless, disturbing, haunting, honest. And, ultimately, redemptive. Scarano is a poet worthy of our full attention."--Daryl Farmer"'Doesn't sickness require a period of wellness / to be measured against?' Essential questions surrounding the body and sickness are the obsession of Caitlin Scarano's speaker in this book, which is part-prose, part-poem, and wholly concerned with what circumstances of life are survivable. In a book-length narrative, hybridity becomes a thing of the self, of the world, of relationships, of the body living with disease. Rife with research, these conflicts are further demonstrated by fractured language and image on each page. But, 'there is always a line:' what survives and what doesn't. This book is a triumph of language and its uses. Of the ways experience can be translated. It pulls the reader into its grief chorus through the wonder of those living with sickness, through the conditions that make our lives (im)possible."--Chelsea Dingman

The Hatchet and the Hammer

Literature & Fiction

Scarano, Caitlin

Poetry

Ricochet Editions

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

Write Bloody Publishing

About the Author\nOriginally 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.\nWinner 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.

The Necessity of Wildfire: Poems

Self-Help

Relationships

Blair

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Books by Scarano, Caitlin