​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.