Stacie Cassarino

Stacie Cassarino Poems

Stacie Cassarino Biography

Stacie Cassarino (born 1975) is an American poet and author of the collection Zero at the Bone. Born in Hartford, Connecticut of Italian heritage, she is a graduate of Middlebury College (BA, 1997), University of Washington (MA, 2000), and UCLA (PhD, 2013). Cassarino has taught in the English departments at Middlebury College in Vermont, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and UCLA. She has also worked as a private chef, and cooked at Babbo in New York City. Her poetry, which deals with subjects such as place, desire, and loss, has been published in notable literary journals such as The New Republic, Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, AGNI and the Comstock Review (where she was awarded the 2003 winning poem). Her poem "Summer Solstice" was featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writers’ Almanac on NPR in 2011. In 2005, she won the "Discovery"/The Nation Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize, was nominated for the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2007, and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also received a major award from the Astraea Foundation Writer's Fund. Her collection of poetry, Zero at the Bone, was published by New Issues Press in 2009 to critical acclaim. It won a 2010 Lambda Literary Award, and the Audre Lorde Award. Her work has been widely commented on, by poets such as the British writer Glyn Maxwell who reviewed the collection stating: "Cassarino's voice ranges far and near, from the gasp and sigh of creaturely love to the dizzying spaces of American distance, whiteness, silence. Few poets these days can draw their lines so strongly...")

The Best Poem Of Stacie Cassarino

Goldfish Are Ordinary

At the pet store on Court Street,
I search for the perfect fish.
The black moor, the blue damsel,
cichlids and neons. Something
to distract your sadness, something
you don't need to love you back.
Maybe a goldfish, the flaring tail,
orange, red-capped, pearled body,
the darting translucence? Goldfish
are ordinary, the boy selling fish
says to me. I turn back to the tank,
all of this grace and brilliance,
such simplicity the self could fail
to see. In three months I'll leave
this city. Today, a chill in the air,
you're reading Beckett fifty blocks
away, I'm looking at the orphaned
bodies of fish, undulant and gold fervor.
Do you want to see aggression?
the boy asks, holding a purple beta fish
to the light while dropping handfuls
of minnows into the bowl. He says,
I know you're a girl and all
but sometimes it's good to see.
Outside, in the rain, we love
with our hands tied,
while things tear away at us.

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