Joseph Fasano was born and raised in New York State's Hudson River Valley. He earned a BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 2005 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2008. His poem "Mahler in New York" won the 2008 RATTLE Poetry Prize, and he has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize, the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. He teaches at Columbia University, among other institutions.

Books by Joseph Fasano:

Other poems on the web by Joseph Fasano:
"October"
Four poems
Two poems
"Sudden Hymn to Autumn"
"Mahler in New York"
"Beginning"

About Fugue for Other Hands:

"I have seen these poems coming for some time, but it is only now, when they are ample within my grasp, dark to my eyes and dolorous to my hearing—feast and leave not plenty is the poet’s desperate gospel—that I have learned their active nature, how they attend in the reading: it is country-living and country-perishing that is consecrated here, where Joseph Fasano traverses each threshold the way a child touches everything, with the hand of his murderer. These hinterland poems are singularly lovely, but it is in their multifold gathering that they score, that they gain their ultimate musical identity, a symphony of release the poet calls it, like Wagner and Mahler, preternaturally rich."
—Richard Howard

"Audacious, moody, surreal but never silly, wise but never pithy or pontificating, Fugue for Other Hands is like a skull-sized mushroom that appears in the forest after a rainstorm—it is a logical product of the forest, and of the storm, and of time itself, but we still gasp when we behold it, and we are humbled to have it entrusted to us."
—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