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Having written a book called Wolf Centos that opens with the quote ""All the poetry has wolves in it, Pam,"" how could I not be entranced by a book such as Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf, given the ways in which Cassandra Whitaker so exquisitely and recursively renders poem after poem, queering and querying the image of the wolf, writing ""Quite like a wolf, but queer. Like hunger / for the moon, except joyous /instead of empty."" These are brilliant missives of illumination and transformation that employ wolves, to paraphrase Larry Levis, as emblems of contemplation and examination for what has often been silenced within. Weaving their way through loneliness, emptiness, and hunger, Whitaker crafts an Angela Carter universe where ""The wolf unzipped / its fur and slipped out, /a doe""; and where, even in the midst of anger and peril, ""the doe began / to sing."" This book is that singing and it is marvelous. -Simone Muench

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9781956907186

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Cassandra Whitaker's Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf amazes with its ferocity, subtlety, and sheer originality. With startling fervor, these poems portray and embody the agonies and triumphs of living one's primary truth. Like no other poet, Whitaker attends to the liminal spaces between self and family, wildness and culture, freedom and necessity. Contemporary poetry is richer and deeper for this astonishing collection.-Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American PoetryCassandra Whitaker's debut collection Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf is a relapsing memory. And just as memories rewrite themselves over time, this collection revises how we remember ourselves in family dynamics. This collection is interrogation ""on the space between emptiness"" through repetition, visualization, splitting of the page, and personification of the wolf (the tyrannical parent, the unfit caregiver) . Every step we take with these poems brings us inches closer to the jaws of the wolf.-Jason B. Crawford, author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz""The wolf announces all worth,"" Cassandra Whitaker writes in A Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf, ""with his saddest syllable."" This book is many things, including a new script to recast an old fairy tale, a way of re-diagraming what family and love can mean, a tool to reveal the wolf in language's clothing, a suture for the wound. ""My voice sings back,"" Whitaker writes in one wise poem and adds in another, ""a chorus humming-here-here-find us/ here A body-a door."" In A Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf, Cassandra Whitaker has given us a doorway that leads into astonishment. She has written unforgettable and necessary book.-James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy, & co-host of the podcast Breaking FormCassandra Whitaker's dazzling contribution, ""What Claims Wolves Laid Upon My Body,"" also claims its space, formally innovative in its construction. The subject matter, radical juxtaposition of subject matter with antiquated form, proving the validity and necessity for both. -Heavy Feather Review, 2024 Cassandra Whitaker's Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf is indulgent, showing us that everything is connected. Through its use of contrapuntal, the metaphor of a wolf, portraiture, song, repetition, and fragmentation, it cycles through thoughts-about family, gender-based violence, transformation, emptiness-to refine those thoughts and invites readers to do the same. Through this book, I've come to know more about the wolf inside the speaker, their mom, dad, lovers, and myself. Through reading this, I've relearned what it means to be an active participant-in the act of poetry and life.-KB Brookins, award-winning author of Pretty Cassandra Whitaker's Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf is a recursive, queer tale of transformation. Vulnerable and fierce, dual and singular, the wolf is external, the wolf is internal, the wolf is dynamic. Whitaker's powerful, formally innovative poems present a harrowing journey and reach the apogee of realized joy. 'I am I am I am the oldest answer the moon knows.' -Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Whipsaw

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