Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio Presents Caylin Capra-Thomas

Caylin Capra-Thomas's works include the chapbooks Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books) and The Marilyn Letters (dancing girl press). Her latest work is Iguana, Iguana (2022). Her poems have appeared in journals including New England Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, Hayden's Ferry Review, and many others. The 2018-2020 poet in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy, she now lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she is a PhD student in English and creative writing.

Alive to the beauty and anxiety of new worlds and people, Iguana Iguana imagines a tough and tender soundtrack for tumbleweeds in search of roots. Recursive, deliberate, and as adaptive as their titular lizard, these poems invite us to listen so as to better hear “...the sweet shriek / of those far-off trains you suspect are coming / to claim you. To lay open the hills you haven’t seen.” Caylin Capra-Thomas writes about understanding the strangers we meet and knowing the stranger within. In doing so, she maps a blueprint for "lay[ing] into the world / like it's good enough".