Advance praise for Inheritance:

“In these moving, incandescent, and often mysterious poems, Joseph Fasano makes pain almost bearable with the beauty of his language, the wild leaps of his metaphors.  His is a strong and original voice!”

—Linda Pastan

“Joseph Fasano’s stunning second collection of poems, Inheritance, offers us poem after poem of fierce beauty and visionary power, work whose subtext is always the vigilance of a restless dialectic, a kind of music that listens, that longs to transfigure suffering without violating its factual heartbreak.  The counterpoint here would pitch testament against silence in a great bold fugue where loss connects, shame forgives, bitterness kneels—all as testament to the enormity of who we were, are, and are not yet.  ‘I’ve learned this much from music,’ he writes, ‘If you refuse / music, music will be given to you.’ And what music indeed, what gifts.  With just his second book, Joseph Fasano is one of the best poets I know.”

—Bruce Bond

“Almost everywhere you turn in Inheritance, you find a poet brave enough to return poetry to its troubled and eternal origins…Fasano’s otherworldly melancholy and grace turns out to also be a “worldly clarity.” This is the poet I trust to see the world as it is, quietly writhing around us, like Kafka and Rilke before him. This is the poet who proves the world isn’t what needs restoring so much as us.  With Inheritance, the necessary gifts of one poet’s visionary spirit are now not just his but thankfully ours.”

—Dorothea Lasky

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.