Description
Alive to the beauty and anxiety of new worlds and people, Iguana Iguana imagines a tough and tender soundtrack for tumbleweeds in search of roots. Recursive, deliberate, and as adaptive as their titular lizard, these poems invite us to listen so as to better hear “…the sweet shriek / of those far-off trains you suspect are coming / to claim you. To lay open the hills you haven’t seen.” Caylin Capra-Thomas writes towards understanding the strangers we meet and knowing the stranger within. In doing so, she maps a blueprint for “lay[ing] into the world / like it’s good enough”.
Praise
“Iguana Iguana. What a glorious ride. These wild and wise poems travel so many places, like dreams built from an ordinary life, an ordinary inner madness, and they contain so much humor and humanity, so much muchness and toughness and tenderness and forgiveness. Of everything and everyone. Jim and Sylvester and William, no-see-ums and mothers, good and bad boyfriends, girlfriends, stray cats and dead birds, dancing pecs and death. Damn, I’m impressed.” —Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long
“This is the kind of book, rare indeed, that makes me fall in love with the ‘I’ all over again. The lyric ‘I,’ witness of the land and what dwells upon it: ‘The river / is high again and so are the teenagers.’ Oracle, as well, of interior spaces, and the correspondences that arise between inner and outer: ‘the oranges with hard little navels, the navels identical / to mine.’ The ‘I’ that examines feeling and memory and, in that examination, ignites imagination. Iguana Iguana is composed of many slippery selves—the Florida self, Montana self, daughter, lover, kid, adult, the solitude junkie, the working class self, and the kitchen self, ‘Alive before that moment, alive through the dishes…’ All the selves are united in their lack of cloying hopefulness and easy outs, and their awareness of the mortal body, which is also the source of the book’s comedy: ‘If death is the body’s failure, it is also its final fuck you.’ Caylin Capra-Thomas is a brilliant mystic of the real.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets
“Mining the psychological and philosophical potential of each little moment is where this collection really shines.” – Layla Benitez-James, The Poetry Foundation
“Capra-Thomas…makes playful sport of identity by summoning a series of alter egos and other selves.” – The New York Times
“Capra-Thomas’s witty lyrics blend the mundane and surreal, dramatizing the way a mind makes strange meaning of its surroundings and encounters. Lines weave strands of personal experience, pop culture, and philosophical reflection to assemble a multiplicitous sense of self and relationship to others.” – Poets and Writers
“Suess is right: This book is funny and recursive and, perhaps most of all, it’s comforting—it’s a book about finding and knowing home wherever (and whoever) you are.” – Lauren Korn, Montana Public Radio
“Iguana Iguana is a fragmented road trip of geographical vignettes. While reading, it was easy to imagine the speaker pulling up at my doorstep in an old, beat-up Subaru Outback covered in faded gift shop stickers; she’s modern Plath-grunge as she rolls down her window, lowers her shades, and asks me if I want a ride.” – Daniel Lurie, Fugue
“Caylin Capra-Thomas knows how to make an entrance. By turns, the Columbia-based poet’s opening lines stagger, expose, beguile; they put readers on notice, complicate narratives we too easily swallow, heighten the senses and offer end-around encouragement….To sit with the book is to know it’s all important — Capra-Thomas never wastes a word or loses her voice. Her seamless lyricism and particular perspective ring true, making “Iguana Iguana” one of the best poetry collections of 2022.” – Aarik Danielsen, The Columbia Tribune
Caylin Capra-Thomas 