Fugue for Other Hands (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781930781115)

Eloquent, haunting, and dangerously attuned to both the beauty and the suffering of almost everything alive, the poems in Joseph Fasano's exquisite Fugue for Other Hands suggest the poetry Young Werther might have written if Goethe had transported him into 21st-century American adulthood instead of burying him under a linden tree in fictional Wahlheim. And yet there s no mistaking these poems so distinctive in their conception, and so bold in their execution for anyone else's. I can think of very few recent books of poetry that manage to create such a vivid, wild, psychologically resonant and quite possibly unforgettable atmosphere as that of Fasano's perpetual autumn--Timothy Donnelly

Somewhat indescribable, as original things often are, the poems of Joseph Fasano feel hunted, gathered, built like fires, brewed like storms. Elemental and feral, Fugue for Other Hands is full of disturbing deeds and haunted rituals. At once mythic and specific, these poems are blood-stained, grief-scarred, providing their solace only from their commitment to art's depths. "Say you were the wild gift," one poem states; Fasano has such a gift, and therefore with his bare hands and torn heart makes poems worth living in. --Jeanne Marie Beaumont