The debut book by New York poet Joseph Fasano, “Fugue for Other Hands,” has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Fugue for Other Hands was the winner of the 2011 Cider Press Review Book Award.

Award judge Jeanne Marie Beaumont writes, “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.”

Joseph Fasano’s Fugue for Other Hands was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry by his publisher, Cider Press Review (San Diego). Publishers nominate works to the Pulitzer committee in a variety of categories, including poetry. About 1,000 books of poetry are published each year, and of those, fewer than 100 are generally nominated for consideration. Winners will be announced April 14, 2014.

Joseph Fasano earned his BA from Harvard University and his MFA from Columbia University. He is the author of “Fugue for Other Hands,” winner the 2011 Cider Press Review Book Award. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, Tin House, and other publications. He 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.