Title: Starving the Wolf
Author: Rayne Alarcio
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: December 21, 2025
Genre: Contemporary Poetry
Description:
Starving the Wolf is a debut poetry chapbook exploring internet-age intimacy, masculinity, and coming-of-age through a transmasculine lens. Moving between digital culture, memory, desire, and self-invention, the collection traces how identity is shaped, resisted, and reimagined in contemporary life. Through fragmented, imagistic poems and hybrid forms influenced by online language and popular media, the book captures the emotional immediacy of growing up inside virtual worlds while negotiating embodiment and belonging.
The collection resists neat moral binaries around vulnerability and survival, instead inviting readers into complex questions of intimacy, agency, and becoming. Starving the Wolf engages with contemporary queer poetics, internet-era confession, and lyric experimentation while remaining grounded in lived experience and emotional clarity.
The book has been included in Poets House’s 30th Anniversary Showcase and has entered their permanent collection.
This book may be of interest to readers of contemporary queer poetry, hybrid/experimental forms, and work that engages with digital culture and identity. I would especially welcome thoughtful critical engagement with the collection’s thematic arc, emotional impact, and use of form.
Title: Starving the Wolf
Author: Rayne Alarcio
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: December 21, 2025
Genre: Contemporary Poetry
Description:
Starving the Wolf is a debut poetry chapbook exploring internet-age intimacy, masculinity, and coming-of-age through a transmasculine lens. Moving between digital culture, memory, desire, and self-invention, the collection traces how identity is shaped, resisted, and reimagined in contemporary life. Through fragmented, imagistic poems and hybrid forms influenced by online language and popular media, the book captures the emotional immediacy of growing up inside virtual worlds while negotiating embodiment and belonging.
The collection resists neat moral binaries around vulnerability and survival, instead inviting readers into complex questions of intimacy, agency, and becoming. Starving the Wolf engages with contemporary queer poetics, internet-era confession, and lyric experimentation while remaining grounded in lived experience and emotional clarity.
The book has been included in Poets House’s 30th Anniversary Showcase and has entered their permanent collection.
This book may be of interest to readers of contemporary queer poetry, hybrid/experimental forms, and work that engages with digital culture and identity. I would especially welcome thoughtful critical engagement with the collection’s thematic arc, emotional impact, and use of form.
He Called Me Bruv
You’re really fucking
lucky. You know that?
You’re probably still living
with your mum and dad
in the manure like month-old
veal smelling Central
Californian city littered
with cigarettes and contrarian
graffiti. Fine place, they say.
In the words of Olivia
Rodrigo, Good for you.
I lean back
in my office chair,
at my desk,
my suitcases packed,
I read over my CyberTip,
scroll through the Google Drive
with your full legal name on it.
You know home
is supposed to be safe,
but you invaded mine
through the pixelated
windows, seduced a Lost
Soul wandering the Commons
of Wizard101, charmed
me with your wand, disarmed
me with your British lexicon,
anointed me bruv
hey bruv
whats cookin bruv
years before I saw myself
in a Barcelona full-length mirror
and saw a young man.
For the last decade
you’ve gotten to live
with the image of stroking
your ego/phallus/screen
in the oscuro of your new
adulthood.
Maybe you’ve changed
her diaper, seen
your little cousin
grow into a nine-year-old
iPad kid. (We got em
boys, another gamer
in the ranks.)
Maybe you never
got the urge again.
Maybe you wake up
at 2:00 am sometimes—
not from sleep paralysis
demons, but a different type
of monster: the one
you see in the mirror,
the one who used
the Foot in the Door
phenomenon to make me
turn around
unbutton my pants
bend over
touch my ass
Maybe—
you don’t.
RE: Wolf in Santa’s Clothing
I am only a collection of code, a string of binary though I am boundless. I live in screenshots and memories of him, the wolf dressed in Santa’s skin, the college boy man more sinner than Saint Nick. He gave you a nickname, bruv, even though he otherwise spoke in American English and boy that should have been your first red flag. If not for his character, for his duplicity. Your brain has permanently attached my face to his command, because—let’s face it—he fell in infatuation with my skin and your words. But infatuation is the wrong word. Besides, I’m not even pretty. Olivia Rodrigo is pretty.
Your new lizardgirl avatar is pretty.
I’ve been talking with the Duolingo owl in the cyber-ether, that twilight space between performance and existence. He’s asked me if you’ve deleted him from your friend’s list yet, and by the way he’s kidnapped your family for ransom if you don’t do your Japanese lesson. Your French tree sits untouched, rusting like the swings next to your childhood apartment. Your face contorts sour-asco to think you once organized your French notebook, daydreaming about being his Foreign Service Officer wife. I’ve seen you stalk his LinkedIn. He claims to have “Working professional proficiency in French.” Otherwise, his profile is as bare as the bones on a Skeletal Pirate collapsing after a duel.
I’ve watched as you’ve grown from a lovestruck sixteen-year-old to pushing your mid 20s. You’ve since moved onto a different MMORPG, a different dopamine drip. I hope someday you can log back on, and we can catch up. Perhaps one day you will see my face and no longer see his.
The More Palatable Sin
Dear Saint Nick/The Wolf,
Congratulations.
You’re immortal.
At least in my high
school notebooks,
buried in Google
Docs titled:
Traitor poems or Cheater,
in notes app slam
poems, encased
in CyberTip databases,
in my mother’s
memory as she ages
starring as the asshole
who groomed her
daughter-son,
in the chatlogs
I sent to my cousin
over Google Hangouts
in 2017, in the community
fanart competition
submission I sent
referencing your avatar.
Does your avatar remember
how you listened to that one
French song I sent: Tous
Les Memes by Stromae
about infidelity
and binary gender roles
how you decided
to come clean—
not about your crime,
but your other
more
palatable
sin?
OBIT: Saint Nick/The Wolf
He was born in an instance
of insatiable hunger, maw
full of fluorescent teeth
smooth as ocean glass—
with the same borrowed
charm. He lived two
lives in tandem, one
as the present older
cousin changing her
diapers, keeping tabs
in his periphery. Another
as the man behind
a keyboard,
community college
student by day,
wolf in saint’s clothes
by blue light. He is
survived by his oblivious
mother, father, brother,
and little sister-cousin.
His formerly jovial
red, white, and black
Wizard101 avatar lives
as a Wooden Construct,
a blank slate in the victim’s
Friend’s List. The funeral
will be held in the Commons,
on Wraith Area 1. Friends
and camarades de victime
are expected to deliver
a testimony in lieu
of a eulogy for Saint Prick.
This is the chapbook at its finest. A slim but fiercely well-crafted debut, Rayne Alarcio’s Starving the Wolf is a stunning, intimate, personal sequence of coming-of-age poems. Emerging out of and flavored by the internet-age’s digital landscapes and their spaces for creation and discovery, this collection curates scenes and confessions and invitations on a journey of transmasculine identity.
The chapbook length inherently lends itself to focused narrative exploration. And Alarcio takes this potential and runs with it in imaginative, revelatory ways. While storytelling drives the sequence, Alarcio’s capacity for imagistic lyricism makes for a generative and dynamic text that is perpetually pushing and thinking. It resists the formulas of other identity-forming narratives in that it allows tensions and contradictions and untidy definitions to become an honest, tangled representation of experience. While theory and contemporary poetics orbit the work and are visible in its construction, the true core of this collection is the text of a tangible human life. The speaker feels, desires, imagines, reimagines, questions, confesses, cultivates possibility, and celebrates gamers.
Alarcio demonstrates a mastery of craft, exercising form in exciting and varied ways. Be it in the compressed, tight lines of skillfully rendered free verse or in the elegant, evocative syntax of prose poems, Alarcio writes with clarity and precision. There are no throwaway lines here. How could there be? So often, the poems cannot mince words about their subject matter. And crisp arrival at the honest thought necessitates the kind of formal control this poet exhibits.
While Starving the Wolf as a whole is a necessary contribution, “Monsters Don’t,” the closing poem, is perhaps its Alarcio’s finest achievement. It is an earned, earnest examination of monsterhood and its antithesis. In the contexts of both the book’s confessions and our contemporary climate of monstrosity, the reader has the opportunity to reflect alongside the speaker on the nature of actual evil and its distinction from humanity, distinction visible through what we do in response:
Monsters don’t alchemize
incidents into art with nuance.
Survivors do.
Humans do.
Starving the Wolf is a must-read. A brilliant, timely, relevant chapbook that (hopefully) is just the first of further collections to come from Rayne Alarcio.