Vincent by Joseph Fasano

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Vincent by Joseph Fasano (Cider Press Review, paperback)

Publication Date: June 1, 2015

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. “Authorities say a man was stabbed to death, decapitated and partly cannibalized in what appears to be a random act of violence on board a bus that was en route to Winnipeg late Wednesday.” With these starkly haunting words from a 2008 Canadian news report, Joseph Fasano begins VINCENT, a book-length poem based on Vince Li’s killing of Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Using a fictionalized first-person narrative from the perspective of the killer, Fasano explores the inner workings of a disturbed mind trying to come to terms with a horrific act that even its perpetrator cannot fully comprehend. “Have you smelled the rose oil / in the shoes of the dead… have you woken / and woken / and woken,” the speaker asks us. And the poem will not let us say no.

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