Cooking Lessons

Nina Romano's debut collection celebrates the enchantment of love, life, family, and food. Reading Romano's poetry is like taking a voyage through an exotic landscape, accompanied by the most adventurous and insightful of guides. Pleasures and surprises abound. The poems glow like jewels, vessels filled to the brim. Come join us at the table. Cooking Lessons promises a feast.

Do not read this book if you are hungry. Do not read this book if the beauty of the Italian language, the joy of Italian life, and the flavors and smells of Italian food drive you mad with desire. Do not read this book unless you are prepared to drop everything, fly to Rome, and fall in love. Or save yourself the trouble: read this book right now, experience it all, and thank Nina Romano for creating a poetic banquet rich enough to feed a multitude of hungry readers.

-- Campbell McGrath--

Satisfying as an elegant seven-course meal, Nina Romano's poems are sensuously delicious. Reading these poems, you may not learn how to cook, but you will learn about abundances and scarcity, the elaborate journeys families make. Romano employs images of food as love, nourishment, communication her poems are irresistible, complex, and rich with flavor. Sit down and enjoy the feast.

--Denise Duhamel--

Nina Romano's Cooking Lessons is a sensory delight not just food you can taste the rich, rich magic of all of life in these love poems for the world. A celebratory, embracing spirit dominates this fine debut collection.

--Jim Daniels--

In "Cooking Lessons" Nina Romano serves up a brew of tender and bittersweet poems, steeped in history and simmered in love. She celebrates the simple virtues of food, family, and the communal table. She knows that culture is everything we don't have to do to survive- it's poetry, it's cuisine, it's remembering our roots and passing our gifts on to others.

--John Dufresne--

What a pleasure to read these savory and evocative poems of good food, rich family traditions, and love. Cooking Lessons is teeming with the textures and flavors of actual life. These poems are recipes for healing and delight.

--Michael Hettich--

What I love most about Nina Romano's Cooking Lessons is the way it deftly mixes delicious ingredients into well-crafted and beautiful poems. She has written the Great Italo-American poetry book of love and food and Nina's wise and compassionate voice urges us to join her in the banquet. The exquisite particulars of tomatoes, garlic, roasted peppers and the like, combined with her evocations of place and memory, lead us unfailingly toward a sensual, lyrical feast.

--Jesse Millner--