Persea Books | Cover Art by Isabelle Menin

Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award

Recommended “Newly Published Poetry” in The New York Times Book Review, 2023

Stacie Cassarino’s second collection, Each Luminous Thing, explores the joys and thrills and, yes, the terrors of motherhood. These are poems caught between the delights of life and the certainty of death. Cassarino never forgets that there’s nothing truly domestic about being a mother; it’s always an adventure in the natural world — Recommended in The Washington Post Book Club by Book World editor Ron Charles, 2023

a stellar second act to her Lamda Literary Award-winning debut, Zero at the Bone — Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews, 2023

Bless this astonishing book—its sacred pursuit of belonging, its staggering contact with beauty, its abiding belief in bearing more deeply the awesomeness and agonies of love’s transformational power. — Geffrey Michael Davis

There are those rare second books—quiet and aching with the labor of their long arrival—that I have been happy to wait and wish for. This is one of them. — Keetje Kuipers

Reviewed by Lisa Russ Spaar, Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry, in The Adroit Journal, 2024

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The Ohio State University Press | Cover Art by Ali Silverstein

Nominated for the Lora Romero Prize (ASA) and the James Russell Lowell Prize (MLA)

…an insightful, enthusiastic tutorial on why cross mapping culinary writing (especially cookbooks) and poetry has the potential to cast new light on both sides of the equation… What Cassarino has to offer is something quite different. Culinary Poetics enhances our understanding of why poetry and recipes innately belong together under the rubric of food writing. That alone is no mean feat. —Doris Witt

Cassarino innovatively advances the notion that some cookbooks contain evidence of ‘artistic practice’ or ‘creative sensibilities’ that renders them apt for comparison with poetic texts. —Vivian Nun Halloran

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New Issues Press

Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award

Finalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollack Prize, May Swenson Poetry Award, Carnegie Mellon Prize, Anhinga Prize, New Issues Prize, Beatrice Hawley Award; Semifinalist for the Walt Whitman Award, A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Perugia Press Intro Award

Zero At The Bone is a book of awakened sensitivities and passing glances at one’s youthful reflection (sparking everywhere). Its pleasures come from sonorous reckonings with what the eye sees there. — Ron Slate

Of the many ways of knowing the world, Stacie Cassarino in her elegant and poignant first book of poems, Zero at the Bone, reminds us of the primacy of the senses. She tells us ‘our mouths try to get it right’ or that the ‘mouth of the trees’ will swallow us whole, by which she means taste is the most direct authenticator of experience and also the most defenseless because it’s instruments of lips and tongue are eager. As a result, her great pre-occupation is with the vulnerability of human relationships, but as the title of the book suggests, Cassarino is fearless in her explorations of the risks. She knows ‘you’ve got to live like everything will hurt you.' — Michael Collier

ORDER | BLURBS

Each Luminous Thing | 2023

Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature | 2018

Zero at the Bone | 2009