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

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 Nausica 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