The Necessity of Wildfire

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, unravelling 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 galvanised 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 unravelling 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.