This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.
Next, Krista selected Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas, released by Deep Vellum in 2022, which was chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel.
Patron Saints
The people were not cruel, but the town was.
In its heart, it was. In its heart of mills and falls
and wind, it flogged itself, its people, who loved
God and prayed to So-and-So, patron saint of
whatever. Everyone there waiting for something
that would never return. Some had waited so long,
they forgot what it was and decided to call it heaven—
the thing they waited for, that is. The town
was not heaven but was also—sometimes,
when I think about it—not Earth.
Some other, nowhere place. Alien in its grey
and beige, its salted streets and stone walls.
Some days I’d climb to the top of the road
to the old farm where my father saw his collie’s
ghost. And I’d stand there waiting to see Franz,
thinking, It’s true we all come back, everything,
everyone returns. And when I saw nothing
but late winter’s gold lick the forsaken trees
and some schoolmates tool by in an old Saturn
ringed around the rims with snow, I knew
I’d been abandoned by something, that Saint
So-and-So was sleeping, forever sleeping—leave
her be—and whatever I was waiting for lived
somewhere else and I was never coming back.
Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), as well as the chapbook Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books), and her poems and nonfiction have appeared in venues like Pleiades, Copper Nickel, New England Review, 32 Poems, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Studios of Key West, she was the 2018-2020 poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she studies nonfiction, poetry, and ecocriticism in Mizzou’s PhD program, but she calls New England home.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
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