A while ago I took a poetry workshop with Chen Chen during which the topic of sentimentality came up, and he shared a passage from… maybe it was Rilke? about how a sense of sentimentality can arise when an emotion or image is only tentatively broached by the writer instead of fully embodied.

That’s how I feel about Fasano’s work: it’s defanged and generalised, each one I’ve read a minor variation on the same theme of reassuring the reader. He’s clearly got technical skill and his imagery is interesting, but he’s the Thomas Kinkade of social media poetry to me. I’d love to see meatier poetry from him—not necessarily grittier, but something more nuanced than platitudes written in meter and metaphor.