Cover Art: Brooke Shaden
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 36 pages
December 31, 2016, ISBN 978-1-936919-43-7
About Caylin Capra-Thomas
Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of two chapbooks, Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books, 2016) and The Marilyn Letters, (dancing girl press, 2013). Her poems have been published in journals such as Crazyhorse, Bat City Review, Willow Springs, The Journal, Puerto del Sol, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Salamander, Quarterly West, Sixth Finch, Phantom, Whiskey Island, Vinyl, Portland Review, New South, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Louisville Literary Arts Association’s 2016 Writer’s Block Prize for Poetry, as well as Yemassee’s 2016 Nonfiction Prize. She earned her undergraduate degree in English from the University of Vermont in 2009, and her MFA in Creative Writing in 2015 from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she helped to found Free Verse, an organization that teaches creative writing to incarcerated youth in Montana’s juvenile halls. In previous lives, she has taught ESL to adults in Boston, MA, and young people in Toulouse, France. A former poetry editor for CutBank, she currently serves as poetry editor for The Nottingham Review, and is on the editorial team for a new poetry outfit called Oxidant | Engine. She lives, for now, in Gainesville, Florida.
Inside My Electric City by Caylin Capra-Thomas
About Inside My Electric City
Haunted and visceral, Inside My Electric City is slight, but not spare. Each small poem is packed full as a getaway suitcase with dangerous implements, predatory animals, and the relics of ruined places, lives, and relationships. Even its use of white space suggests presence instead of absence- an omen of something to come. Lovers are "future aperture[s,]" mouths are "wild, uninhabited," and waiting to be filled with jackals. These openings indicate that what is possible is also doomed. And yet, the poems maintain a kind of reverence for all the calamity. The poems insist "We are not choking. / We are settling our accounts."
