About

Betrayed by a trusted adult, an isolated boy holds his Argos close and whispers the truth only into that floppy hound’s ear. Let Other Hounds is a debut collection mapping the journey of that shamed boy of ten as he moves courageously through a decade of terror toward freedom. Scott LaMascus breaks silence as an accomplished husband and father who has learned much about the aftermath of boyhood sexual abuse. After fifty years, it is a courageous and stunning gathering of words held close and distilled into poems which speak difficult truths to a culture which continues to fear, deny, and blame those who faced sexual assault. The poems are driven by force of shattered boyhood—profound sadness, burning anger, isolation and much darkness. Yet the poet fearlessly dives down to that wreck, seeking language and metaphor before he braves the perilous ascent back to the sparkling surface of life—toward healing, joy, love and boldness. The poems surprise again and again, but remain grounded in specific place, time, family, and sparkling moments – including canine companionship. The poems move readers through an experience shared by as many as one in six men in the U.S. Along this arduous path lie toxic masculinity, challenges of agency, the heroism of individual and collective action, the imposters of regret and anger, and the search for solidarity and respect with others who delay telling their stories not just to survive, but to thrive.  -- Available wherever books are sold, including www.fernwoodpress.com

What They’re Saying About Let Other Hounds

I was quite moved while reading the poems in this book, which are lyrical, searing, obsessive, and poignant, as the speaker in these poems grapples with childhood sexual abuse and the endless aftermath of memory, silence, and ultimately agency. The poems in this book feel like one long poem of questioning, of compassion, and of honesty. The speaker of these poems writes: “I want to soar on effortless wings,” and the reader is rooting for the speaker.

Victoria Chang

With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2024)

Director of Poetry@Tech, Georgia Tech University

Scott LaMascus’s Let Other Hounds is a lyrical testament to resilience. These poems, written half a century after the boyhood sexual abuse he suffered, chronicle the long and unrelenting struggle to emerge from debilitating shame, as well as the love and honesty, both offered and received, that makes healing possible. Several poems here nearly stopped my heart with their courage to look into the darkness, among them the brief, stunning masterpiece “Poems Pretty as a Picture.” What a gift we are offered by this poet—not mere sweetness or sorrow—but a clarity that is somehow sad and radiant at once. I will return to these poems with gratitude.

Richard Hoffman

Author of People Once Real and Love & Fury

Emeritus Writer in Residence, Emerson College

Let Other Hounds begins with an epigraph from Adrienne Rich, Here in the matrix of need and anger…/tell it over and over. And that is exactly what Scott LaMascus does in these courageous, beautifully-crafted poems which look unflinchingly at sexual abuse and the suffering that lasts for so many long years, and also chronicle the healing that makes room for joy. After dismissing the too easy consolations attributed to Rumi—The wound is where the light gets in—Scott LaMascus goes on to say I seek a God who knows even the bruises/swallow all light and who folds me in this dark. This is a brave and necessary book.

Ellen Bass

Indigo and The Mules of Love, among other poems; co-author of The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988).

(Richard) Scott LaMascus is a writer, producer, and public-humanities advocate in Oklahoma City whose chapbook of poems, The Edited Tongue: A Family’s Year with ALS was released February 12, 2025, by Bottlecap Press in Los Angeles. His debut collection of poems, Let Other Hounds, is forthcoming in 2026 from Fernwood Press. Selected by judge Jackson Holbert for the 2024 Idaho Prize for Poetry long list, the poems break silence after fifty years to explore the aftermath of a serial pedophile in the small-town church of the poet’s boyhood. His poems about rural Oklahoma were recognized with the 2024 Bill Holm Witness Prize for their grounding in a place. His Ph.D. in literary studies is from the University of Oklahoma (1996) and his MFA in poetry is from Antioch University, Los Angeles (2024). He is professor of English, emeritus, at Oklahoma Christian University and director of the McBride Center for Public Humanities, which hosts free, public events with national writers as well as a biennial writers festival. He is on the advisory board of the Jeane Hoffman Smith Center for Film and Literature at Oklahoma City University. He serves on the board of the Federation of States Humanities Councils and before that, had served more than a decade on the board and then as chair of the board of the Oklahoma Humanities council. He is married to Alice Mankin, M.D., and the couple have two sons and two daughters in law, all currently residing in Philadelphia, Pa. Scott's poems may be found in Bracken, Red Ogre Review, Epiphany, The Calendula Review, The Pennine Platform, Red Door and others. 

“This stunning poetry gives voice to the voiceless. For everyone who has lost someone to this cruel disease, Scott LaMascus’s words bring a healing truth and beautiful compassion.”

—Colette Freedman, author of Sister Cities, a full-length motion picture about ALS in a family, with a star-studded cast including Stana Kacic, Jesse Wexler, and Alfred Molina. 

“Poetry makes nothing happen, or so the saying goes, but how about the opposite—what makes poetry happen? A new love, travel, politics, no doubt, but how about terminal illness? Chronicling his father’s struggle with ALS and its effects on their family, Scott LaMascus has written a book of moments lost and regained: a script for a “tender tragedy of quotidian love.” Even though an ALS diagnosis is a death sentence—first goes the throat, then the voice and the lungs, “the very heart of being”—what’s left when “silence opens” is nothing short of a miracle. Like Seamus Heaney, LaMascus refuses to cut corners while wrestling with fate and what some call the human condition, making the best use of his “godforsaken pens.” These beautiful and moving poems are testament to how words can help us make sense of the direst of circumstances.”

—Piotr Florczyk, poet, translator, and author of Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets

“LaMascus constructs a moving poetic collage that speaks to the complexities of accompanying a loved one through the end stages of ALS, while recognizing the caverns of resonance that echo through the silence—the things a caregiver sees and remembers and draws from that disease cannot fully usurp when affiliation is fueled by love and memory so steel strong and lasting. These beautifully written vignettes explore the liminality of the terminal.”

—Liz Baxmeyer, author of Root & Bone and founding Editor-in-Chief of The Calendula Review: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

"These poems ache with grief, yes, but also with a deep, enduring tenderness—between family and land, hammer and nail, father and son. LaMascus, through his own exploration of language, finds meaning and beauty in the silences: of illness, of death, of a father's quiet temperament. There is so much to feel here, it's overwhelming, in the very best of ways."

—Grant Chemidlin, What We Lost in the Swamp

“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a devastating disease. It is the one that we doctors hope we are wrong about. Scott LaMascus's poems provide insights to the power of naming the diagnosis and to the courage as well as the fear of facing the incurable. This book reminds us that medicine does not always come in the form of a pill and that the arts can provide comfort to the soul.”

—Nicole C. Bowden, DO, board certified in neurology, Meinders NeuroScience Center, Mercy Hospital, Oklahoma City.

Purchase the book at www.bottlecap.press/products/edited

A blizzard and howling winds built snow drifts over and around the tin-can trailer where we lived in the winter of 1967. My father's work in the oil fields of Oklahoma was impossible, so we were stuck indoors, four of us in 600 square feet of space. Marooned in a sea of snow drifting higher than our heads, we'd might as well have been 1,000 miles from town instead of one. 

Each night that week, Dad began reading chapters aloud from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which just happened to be in the house. I was hooked. The rich language, imagined world, characters, and conflicts of were a transporting adventure. I was in the South Seas. Worrying for Robinson, the marooned sailor who needed to get back to his family. I remember listening as if Robinson's life somehow depended on us all in that little trailer covered in snow banks.

This formative experience with narrative is my first remembered tale, though I know I'd been absorbing stories since infancy from the King James Bible at church. I lived in a home where reading, songs, and richness of story were all around me. I also enjoyed a large family nearby, back four more generations in Oklahoma, so one Grandparent might be telling a story from the Dust Bowl and another from the early Caine's Ballroom days in boomtown hills of Creek County, when Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys performed a few miles from my grandparents' farm. Stories, characters, and language were all around me, some in the patois of Scots-Irish Okies and some in the poetic richness of 16th century English, some real and living, some imagined. 

Fast forward to college and I tried several majors. None quite fit until I found a variety of English major which incorporated a minor in journalism. A boy of little economic means could become a journalist and make his reading and writing skills pay -- first in scholarships and later in jobs. So I edited the college newspaper and worked several years as a journalist trying to find the right graduate program for me. 

One Ph.D., two sons, and two states later, I was back at my alma mater as a faculty member looking for a way to grow a department and honor my mentor, Dr. Bailey B. McBride. It wasn't long before we'd increased enrollment to 120 majors and were asking the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide a Challenge Grant to permanently endow our McBride Center. What fun I had in academe, helping students and hosting national writers who could inspire them -- including novelist Marilynne Robinson, playwright David Henry Hwang, activist Bryan Stevenson, nonfiction author David Grann, and poets Robert Pinsky, Dana Gioia, and Kathleen Norris. 

Once our sons had graduated and gone off to the East Coast, I started using my summer and fall breaks for a low-residency MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Before I could graduate, my father became ill. Turned out, he had ALS and my mother and sister and I were caring for him at home, so I retired the same term. He passed away five days after my Antioch graduation. The Edited Tongue: A Family's Year with ALS was my first chapbook.

The chance to write "full time" has come to me and I'm living it up.