Ravenous Bliss

Praise for Ravenous Bliss: New and Selected Love Poems

“Beginning with ‘the whirr of the sewing machine’ and ending with ‘the shining thread to join all small and large lives,’ Ravenous Bliss is a meditation on love in its many incarnations. These poems are full of resonant, natural images and shine with James Bertolino’s big open heart.”

            ~ Ellen Bass, author of Mules of Love and The Human Line

“For more than four decades, James Bertolino has been writing love poems, poems of bliss so musical and urgent, so nuanced and bold, they’re ravenously ecstatic. These love poems ‘…draw nectar/ from the fractures….’  They join ‘…all small and large lives with what lifts/ us toward the sun….’ What a boon to have Bertolino’s love poems—both selected and new—in this one luminous collection.”

            ~ Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate and author of Understory

and The Voluptuary