For the second time, work by CPR author Joseph Fasano is Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week for March 2.
About this poem:
There are any number of responses to trauma, but “the rage for order” is always there. During a trying experience in my own life, I began to search my mind for guides through that difficult and chaotic territory. When I thought of my father, who has navigated his share of ordeal, I expected to find the image of a figure standing in the country of my childhood, bringing the wilderness into order. Instead, I was surprised and moved to find the image of a man, deep in the privacy of his life, asking his world for another kind of mercy: that it shows him how to “let be”. The irony, of course, is that a poem’s form is always just such a stay against chaos, even when it swears it is not.
Read “Mercy” on the Missouri Review Website.
About Joseph Fasano:
Joseph Fasano’s second collection of poems, Inheritance has just been released by Cider Press Review. His first collection, Fugue for Other Hands, won the 2011 Cider Press Review Book Award, and his book-length poem, Vincent, based on the murder of Tim McLean, will be published in June, 2015. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Tin House, FIELD, Measure, Passages North, The Times Literary Supplement, upstreet, RATTLE, and other publications. He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College, and he lives in the Hudson River Valley.
CPR author