A poem is an ecosystem where life happens. There’s ruthlessness, but also so much grace and so much possibility. Poetry situates us where our story connects with other stories, where we navigate bodies and language and distance and place with agency and urgency. We don’t always get clarity and illumination, but the simple act of connecting may lead us to write ourselves into a world and a future that we want to see.
Selected Poems
“Catalog of Cures in Ordinary Time,” America Magazine, Winner of the 2025 Foley Poetry Prize, June 2025
“Imagine,” Brilliant Poetry (2nd Prize), November 2024
“What I Know About Jawns I Learned From Allen Iverson,” Mount Hope Magazine, October 2024
“Field Notes from Cooley Landing,” Rust & Moth, August 2024
“Tree Lighting at Fremont Park in the Second Year of the Pandemic,” The Poetry Lighthouse, January 2024
“Here be dragons, cetaceans, pink crustaceans, dear humans & a book of remembrance,” Anthropocene, January 2024, & Dear Human at the Edge of Time (Paloma Press, 2023)
“An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders and Bodies of Water,” reading at The Cowell Theatre as part of Metro Film and Arts’ “Breaking Down Walls” production, 11 June 2022; West Trestle Review, November/December 2023; CLMP’s Reading List for Filipino American History Month 2024
“Tanaga,” Poetry Magazine/Poetry Foundation, July/August 2021
“There are no kings in America,” Vox Populi (2020), poets.org (2021), Dear Poet (2022), the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai (2022), Poetry Foundation & Poetry Out Loud (2023)
“Haint Blue,” poets.org & San Francisco Chronicle, 19 June 2020
“A Short History of Journey,” poets.org & SFPL Poem-of-the-Day, 16 May 2020
“In Half Moon Bay,” The Banyan Review, Spring 2020
Articles & Essays
“Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman: Process Note #40: Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States,” periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics, June 2024
Hoffman JS, Igloria LA, Cassinetto A. Dear Human at the Edge of Time — a climate change-focused poetry anthology to accompany the Fifth National Climate Assessment [abstract]. In: AGU23: American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting; 2023 Dec 11-15; San Francisco, CA.
Semmens, K. A., Hassler, D., Cassinetto, A., Hoffman, J. S., & Hirshfield, J. (2023, December). Poets for Science at AGU: Building a Community Poem. In AGU23. AGU.
“Against hate,” Op-Ed, The Daily Journal, November 2023
“RHINO Reviews Dear Human at the Edge of Time (interview),” RHINO Poetry, October 2023
“How to be radical on Women’s Equality Day,” Op-Ed, The Daily Journal, August 2022
“Dear Poet 2022,” poets.org, June 2022
“State of poetry in the county,” Op-Ed, The Daily Journal, March 2022
Aileen Cassinetto & C. Sophia Ibardaloza, “The Curse of Akkad,” in The End of the World Project Vol. 1, Richard Lopez et al, eds. Moria Books, 2019, p. 210.
Aileen Cassinetto & Paul Cassinetto, “The House That Progressives Built,” Fellowship, vol. 76, October 2010, 22-23.
Books
AN IMMIGRANT’S GUIDE TO NAVIGATING BORDERS AND BODIES OF WATER (2025)
An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders & Bodies of Water is a study of movement, migration, and the shifting landscapes of identity. Rooted in common rites and daily ritual, these poems trace what we carry and what we leave behind in the ongoing work of negotiating borders within ourselves and across the world.
THE NATURE OF OUR TIMES: POEMS ON AMERICA’S LANDS, WATERS, WILDLIFE, AND OTHER NATURAL WONDERS (2025) (as co-editor)
“What these poems share is a willingness to pay attention. And that attention is not passive. It is a form of care. A choice to stay in relationship with a world that is changing, but not yet lost. That is the thread connecting this book to the larger work of the United By Nature Initiative. We are not just assembling data. We are building a portrait of nature in this country―and of the people who live in relationship with it.”
—Phillip Levin, Ph.D., Professor of Practice, University of Washington and Director of the United By Nature Initiative
DEAR HUMAN AT THE EDGE OF TIME: POEMS ON CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE UNITED STATES (2023) (as co-editor)
“The DEAR HUMAN anthology is rich, deep, and ultimately heartening… So many voices in this book are new to me—that too is heartening. The informedness of the poems. Their integration of fact and feeling… Rachel Carson wrote about the melting ice caps in the late 1940s. Gary Snyder saw what the oil economy was doing in that decade also. The first Earth Day? Not until 1970. We'd already landed on the moon before people began to take in what was needed here on earth… and then came decades of willful not-doing, self-blinding, consuming. But… we saw. We bore witness. There were steps forward along with steps backward. And now more than ever, at last, the chorus of earth-defenders and earth-embracers grows omnipresent, visible not least in the pages of this book.”
—Jane Hirshfield, Co-Founder of Poets for Science and elected member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences
I HAVE A DREAM: INAUGURAL POEMS FOR A NEW GENERATION (2021) (as co-editor)
An anthology featuring the work of 115 students from San Mateo County ages 6 to 16, released on January 9, 2021, nine days before MLK Day and 11 days before Inauguration. Out-of-print but available online here.
MIGOZINE BY PALOMA PRESS (2020-2021) (as editor)
“Sheltering: 46 Poets Document the Early Days of the Pandemic Through Poetry”, Migozine, April 2020
“Year in Poems: A Retrospective Issue”, Migozine, January 2021
“Summer of ’21: Motion, Memory, & Shared Identities”, Migozine, June 2021 (as editor)
THE PINK HOUSE OF PURPLE YAM PRESERVES & OTHER POEMS (2018)
“Steeped in histories and cartographies, Aileen I. Cassinetto’s The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems transports you into another realm. Lyrical and thoughtful juxtaposition, Cassinetto’s poems delve into pasts threading them together into a majestic tapestry. The pink house representing childhood memories and worldly travels. The purple jam or ube as they call it in the Philippines is a delicacy unto its own. Cassinetto’s collection comprises of finely crafted poems, prose and essays, which weaves a story of migration into earthly and divine dominions.”
—Cristina Querrer, author of By Astrolabes & Constellations and The Art of Exporting
“What a marvelous poetic skill Cassinetto has in this 102 page soft cover tome… Included in this collection is a section of unfinished prose and a section of selected essays. Cassinetto brings her amazing control of language to both these sections.”
—Review in North of Oxford by Lynette G. Esposito
“Her poetry and prose teem with life and life-giving water.”
—Review in Halo-Halo by Neil Leadbeater
TRAJE DE BODA (2010)
“Aileen’s first book is a charmer more than a disarmer of the complicated relationships between men and women, mothers and daughters, or colonized and colonizer. The intensity of her voice is not unlike the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral with llantos like these: “I say it’s all right./Yes, if I ever lose my mouth,” and “My old same hides/her face behind a fan.” traje de boda belongs on any serious bookshelf of contemporary poetry.”
—Nick Carbó, author of Chinese, Japanese, What are These?
“Aileen’s traje de boda collects culture in its pieces… Marriage is obviously a theme in the book (traje de boda means wedding dress in Spanish), and I like the way [Cassinetto] mingles culture in with that theme. She manages to explore many aspects of colonial culture, from resisting language erasure to being forced into another culture, but through the process, we don’t lose sight of her as a person.”
—William Allegrezza, p-ramblings, July 2010
“This collection is a mosaic shaped into an intriguing tapestry by a fearless literary pasticheuse.”
—Albert B. Casuga, Galatea Resurrects, December 2010
“A lot of poetry seem to feign intimacy. But that is not the case here.”
—Chris Mansel, The Halo Halo Review, August 2016
*Check out books I loved and blurbed, and some writing exercises.
Aileen Cassinetto 