Frank Paino was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1960.  He holds a B.A. in English from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College.  His work has appeared in many journals, including Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Poetry East, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, and the anthology, Poets for Life.  He has won a number of awards, among them The Missouri Review’s Tom McAfee Discovery Feature and a Pushcart Prize.

“Lavish, passionate, heretical, the poems in Frank Paino’s debut collection, The Rapture of Matter, read like illuminated leaves in a postmodern book of hours.  These fearless poems go where they must with a visionary fervor, guiding the reader through the darkest passages of experience and reminding us of the best, most redemptive qualities of the human spirit.”
– Lynda Hull

“The rapture in this superb first book is initially in the engagement with and attention to detail, a sense of care for the art that then allows Paino’s elegiac vision to achieve an elevating rapture that overcomes the deaths, the losses, the betrayals he faces. It is a vision based on a wondrous music, a mature voice that struggles passionately for dignity in the here and now. ‘Some things are worth risking everything for,’ Paino says in one poem, and the whole book itself is the proof of that statement. Finishing it, I think of the great Rilke, how he wrote to the young poet: ‘no experience has been too slight, and the least incident unfolds like a destiny . . . guided by an infinitely tender hand.’” – Richard Jackson

“It’s almost impossible, reading these poems, to believe they are the ingredients of a first book. So wise, so full of experience and concrete details, they hook us, as few early poems do, into sitting up half the night, rereading. There’s no doubt in my mind that Paino is already one of America’s best poets.” – Paula Rankin

“Frank Paino’s The Rapture of Matter is one of the most impassioned, vigorous, and accomplished first books to be published in a good long while.  By turns fervent, elegiac, and dizzying in their momentum, the poems cast a powerful spell.  At a time when most poems seek to simply mimic the blandest aspects of the period style, Frank Paino writes poems as if his life depended upon them.”  - David Wojahn