The white dog year

Caitlin O'Neill Scarano
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:38 PDT

This creative thesis, a book-length poetry manuscript titled "The White Dog Year," explores issues of gender, sexuality, family, mental health, violence, and rural poverty. In the personal and confessional tradition, the poems in the thesis are both lyrical and narrative. They are in dialogue with a variety of poets, including Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and, more contemporarily, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forche?, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Eduardo Corral, and Allison Seay. "The White Dog Year" exists between imagination and reality, what I refer to as a dreamscape, which is comprised of the physical places where I have lived (Virginia, Ohio and Alaska), my memory of these places, and how I recreate them. This thesis also investigates the relationship between memoir and poetry, and how personal narratives can be told primarily through language, lyricism, and poetic fragments.