Vincent

by Joseph Fasano

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.

Genres: Poetry, Psychology, Mental Health, Fiction, Mental Illness

88 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2015

About the author

Joseph Fasano is the author of the novels The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the "20 Best Small Press Books of 2020." His books of poetry include The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024), The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and a nomination for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year."

Fasano is an educator focusing on innovative learning strategies. He is the author of The Magic Words (TarcherPerigee, 2024), a collection of poetry prompts and educational tools that help unlock the creativity in people of all ages.

Fasano's writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, Measure, Tin House, The Adroit Journal, Verse Daily, PEN Poetry Series, American Literary Review, American Poetry Journal, and the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program, among other publications. He is a Lecturer at Manhattanville University, and he hosts the Daily Poetry Thread on Twitter/X at @Joseph_Fasano_.

Reviews

[Laura Sorrells]

Dark and luminous concurrently. A runaway train of brilliance. I love this poet's work.

[CLIF]

The catalyst for this book-length poem was a lurid crime. The book inhabits the mind of the killer but does not treat the crime itself in a sensationalistic or graphic manner. The lines spool out in unhurried fashion down the page, aerated with plentiful spaces of varying duration and emphasis. Fasano endlessly generates metaphors of startling aptness and originality. Here are some representative examples from pp. 49-50 (I typed these lines exactly as Fasano spaced them, but Goodreads erases his creative spacing):
have you held the evening

like a swum-out stag have you crouched

on your twin's bed face to face

with the mute swan of his blood
...........................................................................................
have you lain down with the dying

like a bellchoir in their evening gloves

have you heard the falcon

of their blood turn around inside them

have you listened to the wind

polishing its faceless coins

on your father's temples

At salient points, Fasano adds mathematical equations to his discourse, as well as a Rorschach-like inkblot. The effect, like Shakespeare's mad speech, is not so much madness, but madness approximated through the intensity of a poetic diction of the most expressionistic kind. This is an inspired and unforgettable book.

[M. Pierce Joyce]

Experimental in terms of Fasano's work; the results are devastatingly beautiful.

[Ina]

Fasano is my favorite poet. There's simply nothing like this book.

[Jeremiah]

A masterpiece of dramatic monologue.

[Jeff Tigchelaar]

Haunting, convincing. Brilliant.

[Gerry LaFemina]

There's a lot of ambition and a lot of beautiful language in this book-length persona poem in the voice of Vincent Li, who killed a man on a Greyhound bus. The poem attempts to capture the ramblings and associative leaps of a deranged mind as it attempts to "right" reality. The murder never happens in the poem, instead what we get is a monologue of someone attempting to find a mathematical formula for reality, for love, for what's missing in all of us that makes us human.

[Kennedy]

As a math teacher, I can say that the use of mathematics in this "beautiful proof" of a poem is utterly fascinating and original. This is exactly how to write about mental illness, about childhood, about how our experiences make us who we are.

[Pierre]

One of the most unusual and moving books I've ever read

[Lara]

Ambitious and alive in imagery; I can’t find anything else I like about this book/poem, unfortunately. Lines like “her fingers smelled like the backs of foals knees” baffled me. Sure, they sound interesting, but they don’t exactly pay off except in brief, obfuscated callbacks later in the poem. I also didn’t appreciate the scattered format and enjambment. I understand the purpose it’s trying to serve, but I felt myself skimming over lines too much when this is a poem that deserves to be closely read. Had I spent longer than an hour reading this, I might’ve found more to enjoy, but at some point I need to learn to start trusting my first instincts, so the truth is: I just didn’t like it as much as I thought I would.