Stacie Cassarino

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.

In her new study, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Stacie Cassarino traces the tradition of avant-garde food experimentation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how a fixation on the materiality of edible things, expressed through the language of food, became a way for American writers to respond to the culinary, political, and aesthetic tastes of the nation. Cassarino takes the reader through the changing dynamics of food production and consumption, from wartime sensibilities of patriotic eating to the postwar excess of culinary cosmopolitanism and finally to contemporary supermarket pastorals. She pairs chefs and poets-Julia Child and Gertrude Stein, Poppy Cannon and Frank O'Hara, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Harryette Mullen-to argue that each converts eating into an aesthetic opportunity that has the power to impact how people consume. In this way, Cassarino reveals the modern cookbook not just as a literary counterpart to contemporary poetry but also as vital to the literature and art occurring around it. From Futurist cookbooks to fast food lyrics, from Gullah recipes to Eat Art, she reminds us that global foodscapes are connected to aesthetic movements in literature and art.