Poets Caitlin Scarano & Ada Limón

Recorded on Friday, May 13 at 6:00 PM PDT
Caitlin Scarano & Ada Limón
A great pairing this should be as two poets with affinity and regard for each other’s work, both read from their newest books. With Bellingham poet Caitlin Scarano, it is a collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire (Blair), chosen by none other than prize judge Ada Limón for the Wren Poetry Prize. “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.” - Kelli Russell Agodon. “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.
As for Ada Limón herself, her sixth collection, The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions), coming in the wake of her National Book Critics Circle book, The Carrying, is one of this year’s most anticipated new books of poetry. For good reason. “The tender, arresting sixth collection from Limón is an ode to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that characterizes the natural world . . . Limón’s crystalline language is a feast for the senses, bringing monumental significance to the minuscule and revealing life in every blade of grass.”-Publishers Weekly. “In The Hurting Kind, [Limón] touches on the pain of living in the world today (the wounds of the natural world, the pandemic between us), but it is not all sorrows . . . You don’t have to look hard to see the joy and the small celebrations of the things that bind us to one another. The Hurting Kind is a book composed of our connective tissue.”-Literary Hub.
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