Caitlyn Curran holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Her recent work can be found in: The Shore, The American Journal of Poetry, Basalt, Grist, Hubbub, Miramar, PANK, Raleigh Review, SALT, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She was a 2018 Centrum Fellow at the Port Townsend Writers Conference, recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize, and runner-up in the 2021 Grist Proforma Contest. Her full-length manuscript, With Midnight Down Your Throat, was selected as the 2022 Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize winner, and is published from Willow Springs Books.
Debut Collection, With Midnight Down Your Throat, Out Now!
Selected by Geffrey Davis as the winner of the inaugural Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize, With Midnight Down Your Throat is the debut poetry collection by Caitlyn Curran. In the foreword for With Midnight Down Your Throat, Geffrey Davis writes:
“Once, daring light… That’s the phrasal synthesis that opens and closes this powerful debut by Caitlyn Curran. And it resonates with the book’s precise instincts for... how working to reconcile a personal and familial legacy that intersects with collective experiences of poverty, mental illness, addiction, domestic violence, gun violence, sexual abuse, infertility, sudden deaths, &c. (any one of which, without proper support, could produce a darkness thick enough to diminish one’s voice) can sometimes feel like challenging a vast and impartial history of stars to answer your individual trauma. […] I’ve needed books like this my whole life, books that map with intention and integrity the valleys of a life’s sorrows.”
The book can be ordered now via Willow Springs Books.
More Praise for With Midnight Down Your Throat—
"It is not the poet's job to reflect our own lives back at us, our own childhoods, our own traumas, but thank God Caitlyn Curran has. Reading With Midnight Down Your Throat I felt I was walking through the broken glass of my own childhood again, but this time, with someone fierce enough to protect me. Curran is a poet of experience, empathy, raw honesty, and lyric fire. If this book was a drink I'd buy a round for the whole bar—the whole world"
—Matthew Dickman, Author of Husbandry
“These necessary, urgent, pitch-perfect poems sing of damage—from early death, addiction, family violence—but also of survival and growing up, blending the confessional and formal with seeming effortlessness. No one but Curran could use the ancient Persian ghazal to talk about being “pretty white trash” this naturally, or grieve a boyfriend, killed in a gruesome wreck, with such tenderness, such directness, such lyricism that we almost feel the blood under our own fingernails. “The hose water /spat back nothing / but more glare,” Curran writes, and these are scintillating, visceral poems that have light and life glaring off every word.”
—Alexandra Teague, author of Or What We'll Call Desire
"Over and over, this book is a raw, unswerving testament to life on the margins, to survival, to all the irreconcilable and nuanced machinations of the American family. From domestic violence and addiction to cheap smokes and gas station junk food, we watch an artist as she untangles an impossibly knotted ball of string, one heroically witnessed story at a time, each syllable in just the right place. A fantastic and powerful achievement."
—Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences
"In a gorgeous topography of grief, [With Midnight Down Your Throat] is sticky with blood, tender after having been so wedged by loss—clay most molded by all, and everyone we’ve lost. ‘Here,’ in these poems, we learn the “wicked occupation of living” longer than those we love. ‘Here,’ in these poems, we feel the tactile potential energy of a child hovering above a father with reciprocal violence in mind. This poet is so deft in sharing the weightiest of what humans have to offer. What a wonder to be gifted such an intimate sense of this landscape, to be granted a lens focused on the brutalizing truths of this world. I am thankful for these poems, this poet, this land and all it holds."
—Kayleb Rae Candrilli, judge for Grist Pro Forma Prize, 2021, and author of Water I Won’t Touch
“With Midnight Down Your Throat is a visceral collection of poetry that explores the mind-map of childhood and adolescent memory. Traversing a troubled past of childhood trauma and complex family relations, Curran recreates and reshapes the very meaning of memory and what it means to recall. Curran gives us a window into a world of fragmented pain and persistent, numbing loss that is simultaneously sharp and drawn out. Through an abundance of fresh imagery and surprising turns, With Midnight Down Your Throat is an unapologetic examination of how the emotion of formative events can linger long after the concrete memory has been eclipsed by the passage of time.”
—Willow Springs Books