Dear Friends, Family, Fellow Authors, and Cherished Readers,
After many years, the long-awaited, oft-promised book has arrived, and indeed, I am proud to present you with my debut full-length collection of poetry and creative non-fiction pieces.
I Wanted To Write You Into A Love Poem is a compendium of my finest works. Some, you may have seen previously published elsewhere. Most are new and have never appeared publicly.
You can purchase a copy for your bookshelf today by clicking this link.
When I sit down to write, I write with my entire mind, body, and soul. Everything you will find therein is my truth. This book was, in many ways, a labor of love and a trial of my patience.
I would like to thank my publisher, Eliana Drew, for believing in me, as well as my long-time mentor, Robert Hoffman, who saw a spark in me worth kindling. Thank you to Encounters Magazine – you were the first to publish my work and saw in me the good I could not see in myself.
I would like to thank my mother, Marah, for the way she raised me to love reading and writing and for how she has encouraged me and enabled me to pursue this dream.
I would also like to thank a few select friends and family members: Nancy and her husband, David; Mark-san, and his wife, AnnMarie; my friend Daniel, my friend and photographer Eliza, and – last but certainly not least – my dear, sweet Eduardo.
And I owe a great deal of thanks to my elders and ancestors; including my grandmother, the late Marie Cacciatore, and her sister, The One, The Only, The Greatest Great-Aunt Of Them All, My Great-Aunt Jo, who – in the last years of her life – received over 200 letters from me containing poems, stories, letters: always decorated, and other literary ephemera. She was, perhaps, most infamous for saying, “They’re not poems; they’re stories.” I will leave this for you, dear reader, to decide.
Thank you also to my great-grandmother, Annilena, and her mother, Eldridge, for the coffee grinder without which many of these poems would not have been written. And hats off to Joseph Cacciatore, my great-grandfather, who taught my grandmother how to dance “on the sneak” and whose spirit I honor.
Thank you all. You truly are the best of me.
May inspiration find you in unexpected places,
Caitlin Cacciatore
