the wolf's den

Whether its dramatic readings from Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf, or writing workshops ( Beating Hell to Hell: using Dante’s Inferno & the & Deadlies to generate writing, or Discovering Your Voice: writing workshops for youth or beginners), or talks about how to support marginalized youth in schools, I’m available in person or through zoom. Contact me for details.

You can order my new book here.

Buy my new collection from Jackleg Press!

Come and hang out with me and a few friends as we launch Wolf with a one hour poetry reading! 7/29, 7-8 EST

Featuring Tara A Eliot, Katie Kemple, John Nieves : reserve tickets here

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 Poetry

In a series of engagements with the figure of the wolf, Cassandra Whitaker’s Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf moves beyond the usual conceit of wolf-as-predator, crafting a fairy-tale like exploration of masculinity, dysphoria, chronic emptiness, and violence. Rather than taking narrative form, Whitaker’s work utilizes the rhythms and brevity of song—more lullaby than Grimms—utilizing a verse that unfurls, canon-like, into sustained recitatives. On the page, this takes the form of serial poems, diagrams, contrapuntals, antiphonal lyrics. Whitaker’s use of repetition, revision, and mid-poem revelation stand out: The wolf swallowed me / up, one bite at a time, she writes—No. The wolf /swallowed me over /and over/again. // No. I lived / in its jaws. Ultimately, Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf’s movement is not toward a critique but understanding, growth, recovery. What is it to be devoured in failing to devour? She asks and answers for us: I, in the mouth of the wolf / wanting to be devoured? Which is love. -Jos Charles author of Feeld and A Year & Other Poems

Cassandra 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 Form

Cassandra 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 brilliant Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf is nothing less than tour de force, a dazzling epic which chronicles an Odyssey culminating in the psychic assimilation of opposites into wholeness. Masterful formal choices delineate each precarious passage; operatic, contrapuntal stanzas mirror the split, antagonist self, and are metered by the relentless, syncopated breath of predator and prey, as untethered lines float, whispering like ghosts of a Greek chorus. In the final stage of the journey, reconciliation of opposites is achieved by a ultimate and final, Ouroborosistic gesture and sacrifice of body and blood; in kissing me kissed himself—together we fell into a single pleasure.–Nancy Mitchell, author of The Out of Body Shop, and Poet Laureate of Salisbury, Md

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

Oooo I’m in a directory!

https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/cassandra_whitaker

This journal! I have been sending poems here forever. My picture is a wee bit too serious for the poem, but that’s my fault. RBF forever!

I have wanted to place a poem here forever! Dreamy! Thank you!

“The Groombride’s Beard Is As Long As Hope” Carte Blanche

So much gratitude for the love they gave this poem-baby. “Church Ice Cream Social or The Summer I Awoke” American Literary Review Nominated for Best Spiritual Literature, Orison Books, 2024

This is one of those poems that exists in several forms in my notebooks: prose, various interpretations, etc.