Relentless August, by Claire E Scott

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Relentless August is a vivid exploration of identity, desire, recovery, and the pull of home. Set against the sweltering backdrop of Arkansas summers, this chapbook captures the intensity and edge of early adulthood. Claire E Scott's poems braid memory, dream, and the present moment into a nonlinear journey of self-(re)discovery.

Themes of religious trauma, community, and addiction coalesce in these poems' humid environments. With sharp honesty and a deep sense of place, Scott delves into the complexities of returning home after years away, unearthing the emotional terrain of growing up in a southern, evangelical family and celebrating incremental growth in lines such as "the list of what i/ love keeps getting/ longer."

Scott demonstrates technical range with her inclusion of forms like the sonnet, the sestina, and the contrapuntal, and she mines pop culture in praise of an oversized Arby's sign, Britney Spears' music, and Addison Rae's energy drink. These poems move seamlessly between bold confession and quiet reflection, resisting easy categorization, always surprising.

“Claire E Scott’s Relentless August sweats in the suspended humidity of a fraught young adulthood, dunking the reader in oceans and lakes and bug spray as it insists “there’s no way to share a complete story.” Instead, Scott’s poems brilliantly circle themselves, scraping up layers of addiction and doubt like the peeling sunburns blistered across the backs of their subjects. Scott pins memory beneath a deliberately blurred lens, and the resulting poems feel like boats on the water, where “hurt and shame get tangled” to “make desire.” Relentless August capsized me; I drowned in it.”

—Maria Zoccola, author of Helen of Troy, 1993

“Claire E Scott’s Relentless August is a relatable, brilliant memory walk through anguish, estrangement, the poetic Americanism of an Arby’s sign outside our bedroom window, Sonic & Vicodin, reminders of how we suffer and awaken, carrying our pain with us from childhood, with us as we attempt and fail to love you, as you attempt and fail to love us, our Marlboros and Camels, Britney Spears and Dixie Chicks; this life.”

—Elizabeth Ellen, author of Person/a, editor of Hobart and SF/LD Books

“The most vivid sensory memory I have is of all the times my mother inadvertently slashed up my skin with her fingernails while applying Coppertone to my face. Reading Claire’s poems feels just like that.”

—Steven Arcieri, writer and editor at Hobart

Claire E Scott is a poetry candidate in the University of Arkansas’s MFA Program in Creative Writing & Translation. Her poems have been published in BOOTH, Hobart, West Trade Review, and other journals. Claire is the Arkansas International’s Poetry Editor. A native Arkansan, she adores her cat Garfield and does stand-up comedy.