Frank Paino was born in Cleveland, Ohio and earned an MFA from Vermont College. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including: Crab Orchard Review, Catamaran, North American Review, World Literature Today, The Briar Cliff Review, Lake Effect and the anthologies, The Face of Poetry, Poets for Life and, Beyond Earth's Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight. Frank's third book, Obscura, was just published by Orison Books (2020). His first two volumes of poetry, The Rapture of Matter and Out of Eden, were published by Cleveland State University Press. He has received a Pushcart Prize, The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, and a 2016 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

Books by Frank Paino:

Other poems on the web by Frank Paino:
"The End of All Flight"
"Dirge"
Five poems
"Ophelia"
"Taxonomy"

Frank Paino's Website.

Frank Paino on Twitter.

About Obscura:

"This work, with a fetish-like attention to detail, enters the chambers of history we often avoid, stepping into skins both human and beast. [. . .] [Paino's] fascinations sift the wreckage out of grief, desperate to find a way we can all rightly live with so much loss. Because, reader, be warned: within these pages is no typical lyric meditation on how our bodies are destroyed or what becomes of them after their end. No, this is a book unlike anything else being written today. You won't be likely to forget what you encounter here. To quote [Paino]'s description of an exquisitely beautiful photograph of a suicide victim who fell to her death: Once you've seen it, you'll be 'powerless to turn away.'"
—Nickole Brown

"In Frank Paino's long-awaited new book, Obscura, the blessed and the profane both belie a state of bewilderment. The rapturous lyricism and the searing interiority zero in on what is difficult to behold. [. . .] In impeccably musical language, the poems in Obscura will consume you in their 'ravenous fire.'"
—Oliver de la Paz

"Frank Paino's lavishly dark Obscura questions our species' seemingly endless ability to impose harm and destroy others in the name of faith, progress, or pleasure. In poems that unsettle—in the severely sensual way that Dickinson does, in the nauseatingly precise way that Plath does—Paino makes the historical timely, illuminating, like a brush tipped in toxic radium, our deepest interiors. I have been waiting a long time for this book, and will be reading it for years to come."
—Kathy Fagan