More Than Merely Observations

In Thunder Bay's The Chronicle Journal, Michael Sobota's praises Joe Fiorito's "magnificent" All I Have Learned is Where I Have Been for its a "sharpness of reflection" and "crispness of tone." (Review not online yet.) A taste:

I call his poems stories because they are more than merely observations. He tells us about being in the air and looking down at a cemetery, and the way he describes the view we know he is an older man and that there will be a funeral. Little of what I just described is in his literal word choices. It comes from the cadence with which he writes, the spaces between the lines and his closures. All of his poems have a closure, leaving us with an ah hah, or a thud or, too seldom, a smile. Fiorito's writing is not sentimental and the humour that surfaces, when it does, is dry and aching.