It is as if Cassarino is balancing ever-so-delicately on the precipice of revelation.
However, the undercurrent of emotion flows strongly underneath. She offers us beautiful meditations on states of being, rather than focusing on emotional upheaval. Cassarino’s focus becomes clinical in an effort to examine isolation and abandonment from an external perspective. The poet also brings us back, continually, to the body, and the way touch works to heal and destroy: “I tasted the blood on a woman’s fingers/and knew it was me…” and “When we were inside each other/at the same time, I kept my eyes open.”ĭivided into three sections, the collection almost loses momentum in the middle as the speaker attempts to detach from emotion. Later, this confusion becomes palpable when the speaker is attempting to define desire and all of its complicated components.Ĭassarino effortlessly mirrors the natural world to the personal in many of the poems in this collection.
In “Midwest Eclogue,” we see vulnerability in the speaker as she attempts, and fails, to name her surroundings. How does one define desire, love, or loss? These are questions Cassarino wants to find the language to answer. She uses the precise vocabulary of plants and animals (trillium, warbler, fiddleheads) to emphasize the messiness of human existence.
Whether she is in New York, the Midwest, Alaska or the Northwest, places become characters, and the landscape that defines those places is described in great detail.
Places and names are of utmost importance in Cassarino’s poetry. She deftly moves between the precision and sterility of the natural world to the messy and complicated intimacy of lost love. Winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, Cassarino asserts herself as a poet of great skill in this debut collection. Stacie Cassarino’s Zero at the Bone is an emotionally devastating collection of poems examining the complexities of loss and desire.
0 kommentar(er)
