Among Sinners and Saints

poems by Aileen Bassis

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Aileen Bassis’s poetry collection, Among Sinners and Saints, builds on her lifelong practice as a visual artist. Bassis draws the reader to share her humane and empathic gaze through evocative language and striking imagery. Her poems explore a multitude of connections—from Greek mythology to French cinema, the pain and joy of love and marriage, to the ever present realities of grief and hope. She raises questions for us all and seeks to find meaning in our shared humanity in this, our fraught and divided time.

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-962082-89-1 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

Released January 13, 2026 | Copyright 2026

70 pages

Author Biography

Aileen Bassis is a visual artist and poet in New York City with a practice in book arts, printmaking, photography, and installation. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Other Side of the Mirror (Unlikely Books) and Advice for Travelers (Black Sunflowers Press). She has been awarded two poetry residencies to the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a fellowship in poetry from the Yaddo Foundation, and grants in literature from NYState Council on the Arts as well as the Queens Arts Fund. Her poems appear in four anthologies and many journals including The Pinch, Spillway, The Southampton Review, Canary, and Prelude.

Endorsements

“Among Sinners and Saints is a book of refined sensibilities, probing questions, and a musicality that leads a reader through the author’s reflections on the stories of myth, the stories of personal mythology, and the stories that are important for the retention and understanding of our culture. This is also a book that examines the ways in which memory is the center of inquiry for the self, and the poem is the tool Bassis uses to transform personal reflection into something durable, beautiful, and whole.”
—Mark Wunderlich, award-winning poet and fellowship recipient, author most recently of Voluntary Servitude

“Aileen Bassis’s gorgeous book Among Sinners and Saints is full of doors (but do you have consent to enter?), open mouths, wavering boundaries, bodies that grow strange, mishearings and misunderstandings, loved ones gone for many years, a child birthed into a maze of roads—‘twisting a lock I hear tumblers click’ . . . ‘No way in and no way out.’ Bassis sings persuasively of our complicity with every injustice that’s ever been committed: ‘You can’t read his expression but move closer to find your reflection makes you part of this puzzle.’ And Bassis has a deep feeling for the coarse, unsentimental detail of life as it is lived, like broken whiskey bottle bits, as well as the heartbreaking sparks that the five senses, imagination, and empathy strike off of the supposedly ordinary. I’m deeply grateful for this gift.” —Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer, Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge

“In Among Sinners and Saints Aileen Bassis gives readers her acute observation, empathy, and love for the image as seen by a painter’s eye, but also displays at times a sense of menace. Hers is a world of wonders, but also a world of violence and social hierarchies in poems full of the inherent ‘other story’ observed both in the US and during travels. This doubleness gives her collection a deep sense of a searching mind and heart. These poems express this poet’s wide-ranging curiosity, and, as a group, constitute a journey, with a traveler’s notes on travel and the kind of world we live in with its sins as well as love. Moving and acutely observed, Among Sinners and Saints gives us the concrete details that make the work click.”
—Mary Crow, award-winning poet, translator, and essayist; author most recently of Addicted to the Horizon

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