Joseph Campana is a poet, arts critic, and scholar of Renaissance literature. He is the author of three collections of poetry, The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005), Natural Selections (Iowa, 2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Book of Life (Tupelo, 2019). His poetry appears in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Guernica, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Colorado Review, while individual poems have won prizes from Prairie Schooner and the Southwest Review. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He reviews the arts, books, media and culture regularly for The Houston Chronicle, CultureMap, The Kenyon Review, and other venues and is the author of dozens of scholarly essays on Renaissance literature and culture as well as a study of poetics The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham, 2012). He teaches at Rice University where he is Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English.

Other poems by Joseph Campana in Verse Daily:
December 7, 2016:   "Archive" "Inside every prince there is..."
April 10, 2012:   "Bat" "All flesh wants is a little..."
March 30, 2009:   "Hare" "Hare says Moon but Moon..."

Books by Joseph Campana:

Other poems on the web by Joseph Campana:
Three poems
"A Shirt Loves a Body"
"Spring Comes to Ohio"
"Omen"
"Fawn"

Joseph Campana on Twitter.

About The Book of Life:

"In poems that enact the heady rush of history, what we mean when we say 'my life flashed before my eyes,' Joseph Campana gives us the world in swooning context. The Book of Life is at once an ecstatic accounting, a love poem 'to love/what you can't understand,' an elegy for not only what is gone but also for what is steadily going. 'That was/what lured me,' he writes: 'the song of the world disappearing before me...' These poems are a marvel the way life itself is a marvel."
—Natasha Trethewey

"Life, like life, had a prior existence, but the iconic weekly news magazine whose images would saturate the country's visual field was born in 1936, child of the New Deal and the Great Depression. In a brilliant structural proposition, Joseph Campana transforms a family trove of aging magazines into scaffolding for an extended meditation on the contours of self and national community. The writing in these pages is as sensuous and meticulous as the photographs it takes for prompts: 'corn silk / and the squawk / of husking ears,' 'lawnmowers ripping / to life.' But it is also much more: a questing, trenchant portrait of the perishable life we depend upon one another to sustain."
—Linda Gregerson