Meet Alissa
Alissa Sammarco is an attorney and poet. Her poems capture the extraordinary moments in our everyday lives. A two-time winner of the International Impact Book Award, you can find her work in print and online journals including Main Street Rag, Sheila-Na-Gig, Quiet Diamonds, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and elsewhere. “Paper Doll” (Main Street Rag 2026) is her seventh book.
Nine years ago, Alissa’s mother died from bladder cancer. Her time as a daughter, friend, and caregiver inspired a cashe of poems, and the book, Cupcake Day. In honor of her mother, Alissa and poets Jeffrey Hillard and Jo Anne Moser Gibbons, open up in conversation about their experiences and how cancer has touched their lives.
Join us on Thursday, September 17th, 2026 at Roebling Books & Coffee, 601 Overton St., Newport KY, for poetry and conversation. Sales of Alissa’s books will benefit the American Cancer Society, and she has made a special edition release of Cupcake Day for the occasion.
Order your copy for $17.99 plus postage, or for pick up at the event HERE.
Books by Alissa Sammarco:
Paper Doll (Main Street Rag 2026)
Italian Dinner Music (Turning Point 2025)
The Waiting Room (Turning Point 2025)
Cupcake Day (Turning Point 2025)
Moon Landing Day (Finishing Line Press 2024)
I See Them Now (Turning Point 2024)
Beyond the Dawn (Turning Point 2023)
“Are you ever / afraid that we / will evaporate / the way rainwater / tears on rosebuds?” the speaker questions in Alissa Sammarco’s Cupcake Day. Here, is a poetic eye attuned not only to the seasons of nature, but also to the ebb and flow of relationships, and most significantly, to both the failings and resiliency of the human body. Each, we are reminded as the persona undergoes radiation treatments, can “break down, / cell by cell.” Amid motifs of waiting, silence, and loneliness, Sammarco offers hope, a view of savoring “what’s left” after surviving what has changed us.
––Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Editor Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
Alissa Sammarco’s Cupcake Day is vivid and moving, with a keen sense both of imminent loss and daily blessings. “The Architecture of Oncology” approaches cancer treatments by focusing on the building itself where “Ghosts walk back and forth / reflected in the waiting room windows.” Her poems seek new angles and fresh perspectives, as when an account of finishing radiation treatments (“the giant claw with its pointed fingers / shooting gamma rays until something inside boiled over”) answers the doctor’s repeated “Congratulations!” with the poignant “Where’s my cupcake?” Despite the gravity of its theme, the collection is rich in imagery—“Barefoot trails / and blackberry stains / on fingers and face, / green mock-oranges / low on thorny branches” and “He watched as deer rutted and pulled up saplings / looking for true love”—illuminating moments of grace, laced with humor, that the reader can share.
John Philip Drury
Author of The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies
I love to love a good poetry collection that resonates well after it’s back on the bookshelf. The good ones keep rattling for days or weeks; it’s the poet’s talent reflected in the reader’s long-term mental commitment to its truth. And Cupcake Day has consistently hummed under my mental floorboards since its very first readthrough. Or, to borrow from the knife-like sharpness with which Alissa’s images cut: “downstairs, radiation leaks / through cracks in my heart.” Cupcake Day describes the events and mental state of a speaker going through cancer treatment, and the harrowing existential struggles tethered to that experience. As the speaker struggles with control over their situation, Alissa expertly unpacks the fine details and internal strife — we get witness the speaker’s evolution, even as they draw “closed the curtains / against the loneliness of cold, / against the endlessness of lonely.” It is a heartfelt journey riddled with truth, poignant symbolism, and deep empathy for those who struggle with chronic illness. And it is one I would recommend to anyone who enjoys vivid, finely tuned poetry whose high quality will keep it coming back again and again, much like the basil in the speaker’s garden.
– Jeremy Jusek, author of We Grow Tomatoes in Tiny Towns and The Details Will Be Gone Soon
Perspective tends to touch different scopes of life when you are going through treatment for a life-threatening illness. From a younger memory of your Father, the evaluation of the romance between your partner, to the many easter eggs nature leaves for us. Alissa Sammarco’s Cupcake Day is a poetry collection that journals such moments with simplicity while providing numerous avenues of afterthought. Her storytelling comes through with each piece representing a snapshot experience. Filled with articulated emotion and specific imagery that takes you just where the photo was first taken. Alissa’s personality embeds itself in this chapbook with undaunting vulnerability, confidence, and humor, all while having full control of language and the elements of poetry that contributes a reminder to us of why we still read stories.
– SoL, Writer, Rapper, Singer, Poet, Speaker
Beyond the Dawn, Alissa Sammarco’s debut poetry collection, reads like a novella-in-verse. In brief, image-based poems she shows the trajectory of a relationship, from windswept abandon to an uneasy domesticity where, “Not a word slips between tongue and teeth, / only sips of coffee, like the T-shirt in which you sleep, now ragged.” Alissa brings her story alive in these musical, well-drawn poems of love and loss.
In poems as picturesque as any postcard you could send, Alissa Sammarco invites us to a love story in short poems that are tactile and dexterous. These poems make you feel as if they have been dashed off in the breathless haste of arriving and departing. They are a honeymoon, a morning in a beloved coffee shop, a kiss. You can read this collection of poems over or over, but I think they would love to be ripped out and sent around the world.
Alissa Sammarco´s poetry has a simple and particular beauty, the beauty we can find in a smile, a tear or one of Chopin´s nocturnes. It is at times conversational, but it always has a spark both magical and poetic. Like some great poets, she has the ability to turn the ordinary into unique and is able to communicate the complex human emotions in straight forward free verse. Love is at the center of her work, and with love comes acceptance and beauty. In Alissa´s poems there is always something unexpected, a turn that keeps us on our toes, engaged as reader and ready to enjoy the beauty of poetry.
A Longing That Lasts: A Review of Beyond the Dawn
A new book of fine lyric poetry is always a cause for rejoicing. Poems express an intense and personal view of the world, a view not seen before, and thus the world is illuminated as never before.
Alissa Sammarco’s book, Beyond the Dawn, is such a book of fine lyric poetry, one which shows us love in a new way. In “Traveling Together” the contrast of practical things in one suitcase and sparkles in another reveals a love hopeful and possibly doomed. That love might thrive in Belize, “where the rain comes and goes/ it comes and goes’ to show the sweet dailiness of love. In that love, the lovers dance, kissing as they touch their “mouths in time” kisses that become “kisses in the night/ soft whispers on my skin.”
But love can be full of “beautiful things/ you say to me/ in the hours/ when the dark is dark,” but with dawn “fade/ like shadows” as if there is no hope of love lasting beyond early dreams. And yet Sammarco’s tender depiction of love includes gin martinis that “put clouds in my eyes/ that drifted between your fingers / and my skin.” There is the “bourbon on your tongue [that] tastes sweet like Christmas oranges” and “kisses on my arms/ my legs/ soft against the lids of my eyes/and when I wake/ I will have wings.”
In Beyond the Dawn Sammarco reveals love as tentative, tender, erotic, and enduring. She shows us how love can be a force for the sweetest and most powerful metamorphosis from a mere person to a beloved.
