Description:
In the Salt is part love song to a child, part homage to Homer's Penelope.-Bethany Reid, author of The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm
Brief description: Caitlin Dwyer writes, parents, and teaches in Portland, Oregon. She studied English at Pomona College, where she edited the literary magazine, backpacked the Sierra Nevada mountains, and signed up for far too many clubs. After three years teaching and writing in China, Caitlin got her Master of Journalism degree from University of Hong Kong; her essays have since appeared in publications such as Narratively, Longreads, and Creative Nonfiction. She also creates podcasts and audio journalism. Caitlin received her MFA in poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop through Pacific Lutheran University. She teaches writing at Portland Community College, where she works primarily with first-year, first generation college students. In her free time, she is either reading, wandering in the woods, or playing "the floor is lava" with her children.
Review Quotes:
I was astonished by the daring and virtuosity of this collection. In the Salt is part love song to a child, part homage to Homer's Penelope. If "Motherhood is a kind of wildness, a loosening," we find in these poems a painful, tentative hope, the world pulled to tatters by crisis, each morning the threads taken up again.
-Bethany Reid, author of 2023 Sally Albiso Award Winner The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm
In the Salt is one of those rarest experiences that haunts the reader long after setting the book aside. Finding its nexus in the voices of Homer's Nausicaä and Penelope, this collection engages the myths of the female body, of childbirth, motherhood, of desire. And yet, Caitlin Dwyer somehow makes songs of it all. Songs a mother sings to know she is living. Songs a mother sings to keep others alive.
-Kevin Goodan, author of Spot Weather Forecast
With courage and lyric power, Caitlin Dwyer celebrates and suffers a landscape made luminous by the birth of a son who hovers perilously close to dying. Here is a singular terrain of the psyche, the natural world, and the mythic. These poems give off a rare, striking light.
-Greg Glazner, author of Singularity and From the Iron Chair