Starving the Wolf, by Rayne Alarcio

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Starving the Wolf is Rayne Alarcio’s debut poetry chapbook reckoning with online intimacy, grooming, masculinity, and coming of age in the Internet Age. Refusing to sensationalize trauma and rejecting neat moral binaries, Alarcio’s poems function as both map and instruction manual for navigating the experience of being an imperfect victim. Through fragmented, imagistic poetry, the book follows a transmasculine Little Red Riding Hood figure coming face to face with both the monsters in the woods and the wolf within. Grappling with questions of guilt, Starving the Wolf neither absolves nor indicts the survivor-turned-wolf-starver, instead asking, “Do monsters feel guilt? Where does that place you?” These poems do not shy away from the ways childhood sexual trauma informs adult intimacy, capturing the immediacy of growing up in virtual worlds shaped by desire, risk, and refusal. Blending internet-age confessional with lyric poetry and prose-poetry, Starving the Wolf asks readers to sit with the boy who started growing fangs—yet refused to bite. Rayne Alarcio (he/they) is a Los Angeles–born, nonbinary transmasculine Filipino American poet, writer, and media artist. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Cartridge Lit, Fifth Wheel Press, and elsewhere, and has been featured at LAX Terminal 7–8. They have performed their poetry at the 2017 LA Times Festival of Books and the 2023 Kalamazoo Poetry Festival featuring Diane Seuss. A Scholastic Art & Writing National Silver Medalist in Short Story and a finalist for La Poeta Publications’ Rooted in Culture Scholarship, Rayne has opened for Caroline Rothstein and serves as a reader for Exposition Review. They write toward queer/transmasc becoming, diaspora, and myth. Find them @raynealarcio and at www.raynealarcio.com