Luanne Castle’s new hybrid flash memoir, Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026), is now available for pre-order.
Scrap. A piece cut from cloth. Something left over. Scraps from the table. A small child: a scrap of a girl. An altercation: the kids got in a scrap. Torn fabric, bits of cloth swept from the floor of a dress shop. Fabric remnants. What remains.
Scrap: Salvaging a Family explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his own biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. Can this family be salvaged?
PRAISE FOR ‘SCRAP: SALVAGING A FAMILY’
“This lyrical, beautifully imagistic work is both an exploration of the long roots of generational trauma and identity erasure and a vivid look back at growing up female in mid-century America.”
—Kathryn Kulpa, author of A Map of Lost Places
ROOTED AND WINGED
“Reflected in the lake below, the stars watch their lives.
Their light glints off the snake’s prismatic varied scales
and the bullfrogs’ yellow throats along the weedy shore.
Bluegills snap up larvae in slivers of illusory light.
Stars and snakes and frogs and fish, infants and mothers,
forever young and healthy here, survive their lives.”
—from “Waterland” in Rooted and Winged
“[Luanne Castle] calls herself “unknown but solid,” a teller of “tiny limitless tales”, enacting the progression from concrete detail to concrete memory to the kind of numinous memory that can be combustible. ‘When the last star falls to the others, / it darkens like the hush in a theatre, / a twinkling or two from silence.’ There is no arrogance in this book, but there is power.—Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winning author of frank: sonnets, Four-Legged Girl, and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
KIN TYPES
“Because a face never reflects the same, every photo sees something else. You’re your father under the red star and your mother’s grandmother in the morning sun. Now the gauzy mask of your mother’s face floats across her-your features. Another light source and hour. Another shift of the hologram that is you.”
—from “When Your Grandfather Shows You Photographs of His Mother” in Kin Types
“Herein we find all the heart and heartbreak of ordinary lives from the past finally valuated properly, given their own set of lines and stanzas, their own sentences and paragraphs, the attention and care of a gifted and sympathetic writer. It exists at the precise place where literature and history intersect to make something both beautiful and true.”—Justin Hamm, author of American Ephemeral
OUR WOLVES
“Poet Luanne Castle navigates the timeless story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in a compelling collection of sharp, memorable poetry. Our Wolves will haunt you long after you’ve returned from its woods.”—Christine Butterworth-McDermott, author of The Spellbook of Fruit & Flowers
DOLL GOD
“Every day the world subtracts from itself,” Luanne Castle observes. Her wonderfully titled collection, Doll God, with its rich and varied mix of poems part memoir, part myth and tale, shimmers as it swims as poetry is meant to, upstream against the loss.—Stuart Dybek, MacArthur Fellow and author of Streets in Their Own Ink