Description—

26 Poems From Snail River is a selection from the best of the 1995 Quarterly Review of Literature award-winning Snail River. Bertolino is one of two poets to have won this international competition twice. Bertolino’s lyrical style is refreshing and astonishing. His identification with nature is documented in these poems with a reverence and succinctness only found in those who truly honor the earth.

Comments—

“Bertolino makes words sing like an instrument in the hands of a virtuoso…. Many of Bertolino's poems give the reader a renewed sense of awe for everything. ”

—Shirley Guess
Bellingham Herald

Bertolino's poems suggest much, expect much from the reader, who must pause and let them blossom into mind.

—William R. Willan
Literary Magazine Review
Kansas State University

The Flying Dwarf

Today I remember my life
as a dwarf, hands like
flattened kidneys,
fingers fat brown pickles,
only shorter—I still move my hands
as clumsily as then.

There was a brooding to all
I did or felt, a heaviness.
My stubbed legs kept me close
to the earth, where the dead and
decaying found ease. Though stunted,
I was impervious to disease.

The only living thing I ever loved
was a chicken, and it died
before I was through. When nearly
finished with that life, I knew
there'd be another, where my fate would
........resemble
an alchemical model called
"the limitation of four."

If finally I flew, it would be without
a body, or on wings
of sufficient enormity
to bear the full burden
of my species.

—James Bertolino