I write from fascination, from a dedication to the icons that enthrall me. My poems try to find the words and the shapes to do justice to that devotion, be it to media forms, movie stars screen or magazines, or even the contemplative stillness of intensely illuminating rural landscapes. I am the author of three collections of poetry: The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005), Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Book of Life (Tupelo, 2019). Poems appear in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Plume and more. He is the recipient of prizes from Prairie Schooner and The Southwest Review, grants from the NEA, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Houston Arts Alliance, and residencies from UCross and Civitella Ranieri. I serve as contributing editor at Plume for which I write a column.

Praise for The Book of Life:

 “Life, like life, had a prior existence, but the iconic weekly news magazine whose images would saturate the country’s visual field was born in 1936, child of the New Deal and the Great Depression. In a brilliant structural proposition, Joseph Campana transforms a family trove of aging magazines into scaffolding for an extended meditation on the contours of self and national community. The writing in these pages is as sensuous and meticulous as the photographs it takes for prompts: ‘corn silk / and the squawk / of husking ears,’ ‘lawnmowers ripping / to life.’ But it is also much more: a questing, trenchant portrait of the perishable life we depend upon one another to sustain.” —Linda Gregerson, Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor, Department of English, University of Michigan

“In poems that enact the heady rush of history, what we mean when we say “my life flashed before my eyes,” Joseph Campana gives us the world in swooning context. The Book of Life is at once an ecstatic accounting, a love poem ‘to love/what you can’t understand,’ an elegy for not only what is gone but also for what is steadily going. ‘That was/what lured me,’ he writes: ‘the song of the world disappearing before me….’ These poems are a marvel the way life itself is a marvel.” —Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2012-2014

Praise for Natural Selections:

"Joseph Campana’s Natural Selections gently reminds us of the brutal fact that the mythic world remains present in this one. Subtly inverting the Orpheus myth, Campana suffers his beloved’s loss—a division that leads not to an underworld quest, but to wandering the rural roads of Ohio, where the poet does not sing so that the world hears him, but more humbly, more importantly, sings so as to listen to the world."—Dan Beachy-Quick, editor, Colorado Review

"Like James Wright and Sherwood Anderson—both of whom he pays homage to in this stunning collection—Joseph Campana understands that the Midwest is less a place than a strangely inscrutable state of mind, where our losses and vulnerabilities are shown in terrifyingly high relief. This is to say that Campana also understands—as too few poets do these days—that the principal business of the lyric poem is heartbreak. As he puts it in one of the book's most characteristic efforts, 'How potent the longing, / how potent the fear. / The two as one, the two / as hawk and shadow.' Campana's poems haunt, instruct, and console me."—David Wojahn, author, World Tree

Praise for The Book of Faces:

“The Book of Faces provides an arresting study in how such pleasure works, and what it does to the psyche.”—Parnassus

“Joseph Campana’s The Book of Faces is an extraordinary debut. Audrey Hepburn (yes) is the muse and channel for his meditations on the seductions of the screen and page.”—Alice Fulton

“The faces of Joseph Campana’s beautifully inventive first collection are those that stare most urgently at us while we grow blind: hunger (spiritual and literal), war, peace, fame, hope, fashion, heartlessness, greed.”—Jorie Graham