Caitlin Dwyer: In the Salt
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
Waste Threads
I believe I am only really alive for a few moments
each day. I wake up and am dragged back under.
Do you know what that’s like, to see the surface
up there and so rarely breach?
This sensation isn’t related to motherhood.
I’ve always felt this way. If anything, motherhood
breaches me more often. It holds me closer
to the glistening surface of things.
Caitlin Dwyer writes, parents, and teaches in Portland, Oregon. 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..
Visit Caitlin's page at MoonPathPress.com
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Priscilla Long: Cartographies of Home
Priscilla Long’s nimble verse examines the difference between provenance and improvisation in
how we grow up—or, to use the language of one Eastern Shore of Maryland family, how we
“grow away.” This portrait-in-poems’ entrance into adulthood is graceful and sonically
compelling: “I pull red cellophane, / open the pack, shake one out, / strike a match to flare and
whiff of sulfur” (from the poem “Greyhound”). Cartographies of Home is a soulful, erudite, and
ultimately playful look at life in flight.
—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode: Poems
Home-Work
Ice pick. Hive tool. Rural route.
Water—rusty, windmill-pumped.
Sears, Roebuck rubber farm boot.
Each child got her own desk.
Each day after school she found
in her own drawer a box of raisins,
sharpened pencils, the yellow tablet.
Priscilla Long grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She is a Seattle-based
writer, poet, editor, and a longtime independent teacher of writing. She writes science, poetry,
history, creative nonfiction, and fiction. She is author of nine books (to date), including the how-
to write manual The Writer’s Portable Mentor. Her work appears in numerous literary
publications, both print and online, and her science column “Science Frictions” ran for 92 weeks
online at The American Scholar. Her awards include a National Magazine Award (for feature
writing), and ten of her essays have been honored as “notable” in various editions of The Best American Essays.
Visit Priscilla's page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Priscilla's collection from your favorite retailer:
