‘Who ever said / there was a place for you?’ the poet cries out, and Zero at the Bone urges this anxious question in each highly-wrought fibre of its lines. 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 as to make the white space burn like ice, but these fine and focused meditations manage that, till the black scribble of life on the page animates an actual human heat, a speck of life resisting all cold, all loss, all emptiness, while never letting us lose sight of those Furies waiting hungrily in the wings. —Glyn Maxwell
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Zero at the Bone is an emotionally devastating collection of poems examining the complexities of loss and desire…Cassarino is a poet that understands humanity, and will not shy away from showing us just how fragile we are. —Amanda V. Mead, Lambda Literary, 2010
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The title Zero at the Bone, a line from Emily Dickinson's "A narrow fellow in the grass," sets the tone for poems that fluctuate between love and loss: the heat of passion and the frigidity of absence. Cassarino writes frankly about the body and sex. Her poems are full of urgency and longing, her speakers often expressing the relinquishment of self requisite to falling in love…The speaker finds stability in the original poetic act: observation. When proper attention is paid, the natural world becomes a bastion of wonderment, rather than a receptacle for pain…At her best Cassarino is both linguistically dexterous and viscerally emotive… — Jason Tandon, NewPages, 2009
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Every year there’s a book that settles into my life, almost by accident — it lives in my bag, near my desk or bed, always occupying a corner. This year, that book is “Zero at the Bone.” Stacie Cassarino’s first book of poems, published in 2009, is arresting. Each piece addresses a different part of her emotional landscape, where grief and longing have sharpened the senses. The speaker, both empowered and vulnerable, is willing to ask difficult questions of herself and her environment. Her poem “Summer Solstice” begins: “I wanted to see where beauty comes from / without you in the world, hauling my heart / across sixty acres of northeast meadow, / my pockets filling with flowers.” We’re lucky to join her on that journey.
— Recommended by Corinne Segal, Senior multimedia web editor, PBS NewsHour Weekend, 2016