The Last Song of the World

The Last Song of the World

Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World delves into the chaos of the modern world, and searches for resilience in the face of environmental and societal devastation. Dripping with images of ancient ruins and mythological figures, these poems serve as vignettes of fatherhood, love, and desire against the backdrop of apocalyptic events. Through the documentation of ongoing violence and natural phenomena, Fasano depicts the ever-present anxieties of parenting with concision and compassion. The Last Song of the World is a love letter to the world that could be—a world as tender as it is bold, as loving as it is brutal, as beautiful as it is horrendous.  "Give a copy of Joseph Fasano's The Last Song of the World to someone who loves poetry, then give another copy to someone who says they don’t ‘get’ poetry, someone who thinks of it as a lush garden concealed behind a locked gate. There is no gate here. In writing clearly and evocatively about the human experience, Fasano has invited us all inside."  — Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful "Elemental and eloquent in their quest for heart-truths, Joseph Fasano's lucid, almost-transparent poems have the beauty of a questing imagination, alert and aware on its earnest journey through this world."  — Gregory Orr, author of Poetry as Survival “Joseph Fasano's poems have always been necessary and full of the world. They are even more so in this new collection, which is for anyone who has ever been in trouble and needed a path to the way out. This is it."  — Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, and songwriter. His books include The Last Song of the World (2024), The Swallows of Lunetto (2022), The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (2020), 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, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, 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.” His book The Magic Words (TarcherPerigee, 2024), a collection of poetry prompts and exercises, helps people of all ages unlock their creativity. His writing has been widely translated and anthologized, most recently in The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber and Faber). AFTER LOVE Now that you have lost the way you’d taken, walk out through the new moon in the spruces and lie down in the deep leaves of the clearing. Listen: they are still here, the wild things, migrations moving on again from winter. All your life you heard a word of the singing, all your life admitted just a bit of it; all your life you played your one small part. Wake now. Stay here with your parting arms and do it, finally do it: open to the whole of it, the whole of it, the wind that sings what’s been since the beginning. Listen. Listen. Listen. There is no one you’re betraying in your changes when you become the whole wild song of what you are.   SHADOW PUPPETS for my son All my life I sought a little comfort, a little home from which I once was banished. Now I lie beside you in the moonlight and laugh with you at the shadows on the ceiling: these mythic things, these wings, these bears, their dance. All my life my life was trying to make you— you who show me this is what a life is, this living it, this making darkness beautiful, this knowing that our world is in our hands.   WORDS FOUND IN THE RUBBLE AFTER THE LAST WAR Yes, we lived in a time of darkness and did nothing. Yes, we looked up and we saw the sky on fire, and we knew that we had made the flames with our own hands. Yes, we wasted every breath on rage. Children, if any of you have survived this, start again with the simplest things, we beg you. Walk out through the garden of the darkness and touch each other’s faces in the morning air. Slowly. Slowly. Say each other’s names.