Caitlin Dwyer, IN THE SALT
IN THE SALT, Caitlin Dwyer, MoonPath Press, 2026.
Winner of the 2025 Sally Albiso Award
How much more praise can I lavish on this quirky, brilliant collection of poems? The book is woven of two main 
strands: the female characters of Homer’s Odyssey, and the story of the birth and imperiled early life of Dwyer’s son, Quinn, to whom the book is dedicated. The book is woven of dreams, myths, nightmares, and hope. In a way the book is about weaving, and it is Penelope working at her loom that makes this theme clear. She weaves cloth (unweaving it each night, if you’re unfamiliar), as she fends off suitors, longs for her husband’s return, and watches her son grow up.
Strategies I found effective in making the whole coherent were Penelope’s dream sequences of untitled poems; and the several poems titled “Waste Thread” that are scattered throughout, like wasted threads on the floor under a loom. Some of these are short as two lines, but here’s a longer example:
Waste Thread
Silver-tipped rhododendrons.
Lichen-speckled bark.
I close my eyes and dream of rain, wake
and dream of rain. My eyes blur
when I try to focus. When I gaze out
of my eyes and not my head, I feel alive.
Nose in the wet soil. Songs of worm-trace
and limestone, shell-break, calcium pulver.
Phlox in the cracks. I close my eyes
and sugar-syrup coats my tongue, crystallized
honey cracked against a bad tooth.—Caitlin Dwyer
Sometimes (often) the lines blur. Is this Penelope, wasting threads, or is this our poet?
Waste Thread
Buddha says we are all capable of waking up.
The human mind is nothing but sky-flowers.
Cataracts, clouds. Perhaps because I value the body
that made him, I cannot see my son clearly;
he dashes this way and that, wet petals, blur.—Caitlin Dwyer
The final poem, “Song to Call a Body from the Salt,” begins—
Do you recognize the constellations yet?
The bear, the cored apple, the crab? The mother
with her hands full of stars
—and what I notice here is not only the lovely enjambment of the second line into the third, but also an education in progress. A mother, teaching her son about the constellations; a mother, learning to be present with your young son; and the poet, schooling us on her art.
Visit Dwyer’s website to find more poems from the book (including “Changeling,” one of my favorites). You can order a copy from MoonPath Press, or your local independent bookshop.
something I was told when I visited Chartres Catheral: don’t travel as a tourist, but as a pilgrim. “Why did I leave my shore for another?,” Graham asks in “Atlantic Pacific.” This collection of poems answers that question.
I have a handful of travel poems myself, and have never known how to weave them into the tapestry of a book. Neile Graham has the answer—stay longer, write more. “When a mile-long walk can take you 5000 years” (“Westness Walk: Rousay”), then why not?
sections, beginning with her childhood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland: turkey buzzards, garter snakes, molasses milk, honeysuckle. In the middle section, the poems escort us through college, Viet Nam, Civil Rights, Greyhound bus stations, Viceroy cigarettes, banjo music. In the final section Long embraces old age. Also the author of Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, she does so with authority. She’s packed for this journey, and she knows what to do now that she’s here (write more).
poetry presses: MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, and World Enough Writers. She also leads generative workshops, helps people assemble their books of poems, teaches at conferences, and writes her own poetry. To borrow the phrasing from the end of her poem, “A Blue True Dream,” her writing mantra must be “yes and yes and / illimitably yes.” 