Each Luminous Thing: Poems

by Stacie Cassarino

Winner of the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award In Each Luminous Thing , her highly anticipated second collection of poetry, Stacie Cassarino maps the physical cadences of shifting landscapes while navigating desire, longing, loss, and love through the lens of motherhood. From the boreal woods of Vermont to the coastal canyons of Southern California, Stacie Cassarino’s highly anticipated second collection of poetry maps the parallel tracks of walking through shifting terrains and becoming a mother. Cassarino patiently explores the physical cadences of landscapes as they are superimposed with internal and linguistic navigations of desire, longing, loss, and love. Stepping into the natural world with a lens on earthly objects encountered through the seasons, Cassarino holds both sorrow and praise for their ephemerality, and for the fragility of human connection, and in doing so reconciles her own sense of home. These are quiet, resilient poems, reflective of the urgent grasp to preserve and fill the silences that live around and within us; they affirm the presence of beauty through solid facets of nature and through the enthralled body that announces its love, even as things come in and out of focus.

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2023

About the author

Stacie Cassarino is an American poet and author of the collection Zero at the Bone. She is a graduate of Middlebury College (BA, 1997), University of Washington (MA, 2000), and UCLA (PhD, 2014).

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. She is a Copy Editor at ELLE.com.

Cassation lives Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA

Reviews

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good collection. More reflective/introspective in nature than I normally like. There was one poem I found like unethical and literally bad but it was a one-off. A good collection if you want to read about motherhood.

[Lindsey Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to compete with Zero at the Bone since I cannot relate to parenthood. Beautiful and thoughtful, nonetheless.