Caroline Rayner Wants to Hang Out Forever
The Moan Wilds, Caroline Rayner’s full-length debut, is a book-length poem that reads like a road trip—or like an escape into the woods after ruining your own pool party, or like the “A Thousand Miles” music video except it’s in a minor key. Technicolor, recursive, and hypnotically maximalist, the poem is most of all an adventure into the life-giving and destructive powers of desire. “Fucking awesome,” according to the poet’s former teacher Ocean Vuong, the book leans deep into the American Southern epic tradition of the late C.D. Wright, but finds its own groove in the rich sensory detail of Rayner’s contemporary and millennial moment.
Rayner is a poet, music writer, and teacher from Richmond, Virginia. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she taught composition and creative writing. Prior to , Rayner’s poems appeared in Annulet, Black Warrior Review, b l u s h, KEITH LLC, Peach Mag, and elsewhere, as well as in the (Sad Spell Press, 2017).
