Beatitudes/poems

". . . she becomes alternately spiritually expansive in an earthly way, and she becomes naughty in an earthy way. . . . Her bawdiness has always an humane sweetness, a generous kindliness. This volume is so intelligently unmental it brooks no argument." - Mandrake Poetry Review

"Beatitudes offers us an atlas of a difficult world, a world in need of blessing - and Elizabeth Balestrieri is a woman who knows how to bless. These are poems of amazing grace and generosity, sensuously and spiritually luminous. I take deep pleasure in them." - Alicia Ostriker

"Ranging from Detroit, to Mexico City, to Milwaukee, to Tokyo, to San Diego, to Hoboken, Elizabeth Balestrieri explores landscapes of love, loss, recovery, ecstasy. These richly textured, thoughtful and erotic poems are indeed beatitudes: declarations of blessedness and felicity. This wonderful second book flashes like the roses in her 'White Dahlias', with 'passion and purity - conveying simple truths.'" - Ron Wallace

"Elizabeth Balestrieri's Beatitudes is a poetry of passionate attention. Wherever the poet is geographically or temporally in this wide-ranging book, she yearns for what we all need, a life 'thin on terror, fat with gifts: air, water, bread.'. As in her remarkable sequence 'Walt Whitman in Japan,' she does not turn her back on agony. . . but still manages, throughout Beatitudes, to 'grasp the good that slips, into eternity;. This is true poetry's fused song of experience and hope that will always matter." - William Heyen