Dark Octaves

Not since I sat down half a century ago on a bookstore floor with a paperback copy of Alan Dugan's Poems have I been so astonished. Like the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand with its nine extra bass keys, Paino has a supernumerary octave up his sleeve that lends unparalleled depth to this collection. - Roger Weingarten

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Frank Paino's Dark Octaves, a postmodern canon akin to Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell or Milton's Paradise Lost, is nothing less than epic, an existential odyssey, its protagonist a modern-day Prometheus suspended from a dystopian cliff. Paino's speaker tasks his muse from the outset: "It will be the new tongue / you speak." His poems are masterful, his language striking and edgy, a delivery in exquisite allegorical form in historical, mythical, and current time-persons, places, and events that reveal our human condition and its construct of desire and redemption-its beauty and longing, its contradictions and failures. From the martyrdom of St. Catherine of Siena and her holy anorexia to Icarus and his flight into the sun, from the miraculous metamorphosis of the luna moth to the knee on the neck of George Floyd, these poems startle, expose, and transmute their audience, ushering urgency and social responsibility. Dark Octaves ends with the words "beautiful indifference," an oxymoronic paradox that alarms complacency. Paino's Dark Octaves is a call to awaken. -Rosa Lane