Rock Press has entered Nina Romano's book, Cooking Lessons, for the Pulitzer Prize.

Nina's Upcoming Appearances:

Lighthouse Point  Book Reading Group: Thursday, October 25th

Miami Book Fair International
Sunday, November 11, 2007 at 10 AM
Miami, FL

Nina's Past Appearances:

Sunday, September 23, 2007 at 7 PM
Books & Books
Coral Gables, FL

Sunday June 17, 2007 at 7 PM
About this event
Fraser Library
Fraser, CO

Read about this event
Sunday June 10, 2007
Books & Books
Coral Gables, FL

Review # 1
Cooking Lessons, Nina Romano
Rock Press, Editor Tracey Broussard
ISBN 978-0-9676748-7-2
$12.95, 100 Pages

COOKING LESSONS by NINA ROMANO
Reviewed by Elaine Winer

You're sitting on a boat in Sardinia. You've eaten raw sea urchinssprinkled with Vermentino di Gallura and are watching the moon over Porto Cervo Marina, Sardegna. Magic, poet Nina Romano says in her debut collection of poems, Cooking Lessons, Magia. I swear it. I pity everyone who is anywhere else but in this windless, cloudless  Sardinian port tonight.

Romano grew up in Brooklyn with Italian speaking parents. When she moved to Rome, she saw its beauty with fresh eyes. At the same time, her roots were in its culture, and the bilingual poet uses words from both English and Italian like a stone mason fitting stones. There is the sense of an ancient structure to the book, its lushness supported by sure classical knowledge. In Meeting, the persona of the poem walks Roman roads laid down by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and goes to Piazza Mattei to meet her lover at the fountain of turtles. Gazing at the lithe bodies sculpted by Bernini, knowing that her lover will not come, will never come again, she says : but if truth be told,/ the turtles were added later to Bernini s youths,/ How joy springs from those lithe bodies.

Cooking Lessons is not a cook book, it s not about assembling and cooking food in the kitchen. Instead, Romano tells us about the preparation of the food before it is packaged neatly and sent to the grocery store (there are no neatly packaged, sterile products anywhere in this book.) It is an attitude, an expertise, of older and more direct societies.
 
 Here are her directions for preparing caviar, in Recipe for Buttariga,:

From an exemplary female muggine better known as cefalo,
that has reached a certain dimension,
denoting its ovarian maturity,
remove, with a great deal of courtesy, the double ovary pack,
evading cuts in delicate membranes
leaving attached to the eggs
the harder part encasing the summit. 

 Later in the poem, she directs:

The delicacy must dry in an ambient dwelling
a room free of ocean salinity and night humidity. 
The eggs are ready, achieving amber s transparency, colored rosa cupo. 
Here in lies the difficulty conserving buttariga.
Cloak entirely with wax hotter than a melting candle. 

Even gathering fruits and vegetables can have a brutal aspect. Romano tells us, with dazzling, hands-on knowledge, what must happen before figs and mushrooms are ready to be eaten.  In Lover of Baskets :

.. Funghi were dusted of bosk coats,
and skinned in spots. When she'd picked a chilo, minus basket weight,
she quit the thicket, headed home to slice, dice, and dissect every floppy fat
cap and chunky stem till every white-villain-white worm, cajoled by scorching
sun, inched their tiny bodies out in an undisciplined array of crawls,
slithers and creeps, squirming suicidally, to a concrete resting place below ...

Figs are split, quartered and dried above slow smoke fires, almonds from Palermo tucked inside their bellies, then they're skewered/ and shafted onto overgrown opaque wooden picks, impaled upon mini-stakes. In this book, nothing concerning the harvesting of the living things we eat is hidden to make the process look nice.   Nina Romano's words are not nice, they are better than that; they are real. And she reports with a lyric eye, seeing the beauty in these first, necessary and ancient rituals.

In food, she finds her hope for immortality.  In Roasted Peppers she says And now I know for sure we never die till the last person we know dies,/ for just as I am remembering her, so someone else I teach will remember me when I m gone /even if it s just on a 3 X 5 recipe card.

The poet s mother teaches her to cook as a child.  In the title poem, Cooking Lessons, her mother tells her to begin the supper.  Careful with boiling water! her mother warns her. You can t mess up because food is love When the poet is grown, Romano writes of a persona in The Beach at Anzio that the reader guesses might be a bit like the poet herself: You and I walk the shore,/ scoop by handsful/ leafy lettuce-like seaweed /to make fried squid fritters/ that ll sputter in hot oil, a semblance of us in our bubbling matrimony

In Bread, Romano writes about a gift of bread given to her hungry son on the island of Ist, which, she says is the island Marco Polo was born on (the poet has an amazing, wide ranging knowledge of exotic facts).  The last line of this short poem has a stinging rhythm and names money from three countries, using two languages.

The sailor's Slavic, almost good as my Sign, convinced the owner to give me yesterday's fragrant-wood-burning-stone-oven-baked-bread. Zero dinars, zip dollars, zap lire.  Regalo. Per favore. Unsurprisingly, she is an enthusiastic daughter, as well as mother and wife. Remembering her father in the powerful poem, The Deer Slayer, she writes:

His spirit soars above mountain summits. But my father's feelings, thoughts, ashes,
and name have I sucked down with the oyster, clenching a shard of his bone between my teeth with the meat of the crab.

She credits her mother not only for teaching her how to cook, but also for teaching her how to love... In Form and Theory she says,

For years, I stood at her side embezzling preparations, purloining secret flips of the wrist to pound cutlets to paper thinness, filching, for later use, the way she sliced away impertinent gristle or sassy fat, plagiarizing how her hands dipped into mixed breadcrumb she'd fling onto the meat, then top with grated parmesan, forming tiny wells so quickly I barely catch the precision timing in her flicking finger, or drizzle of olive oil

I am my mother's child learning cooking lessons.
In form & theory I am my mother

Underneath these passionate celebrations of life, one senses, finally, a deep unease. The times are at odds with her antique soul, as though Ceres had been transplanted to the twenty-first century, and to Florida.  In the striking poem My Feet Outside the Sheets she writes:

There's a ketch in the stretch of canal at the back of my house.
On summer mornings I wake to find my feet outside the sheet
Beating rhythms to the wind in fittings for the ketch's sails
And the down-to-the-bone of me wants to run away.

My feet are ready, but a golden anklet anchors me for now.
As surely as my son's feathery eyelash kisses my cheek.

It is this sense of deep unease combined with the poet's obvious joy in connection to food and loved ones that creates the heartfelt tensions that make this book so successful. In Cooking Lessons, Romano takes the reader into her rich, passionate, complex world. It is a poetic treat not to be missed.

Review # 2
Cooking Lessons, Nina Romano
Rock Press, Editor Tracey Broussard
ISBN 978-0-9676748-7-2
$12.95, 100 Pages

Love & Food, Staples of Life
By Rita Quinton

            Food and Poetry are an unlikely combination but in the expert hands of widely traveled author Nina Romano we are made to see the beauty of both. Her poetry and short stories have been published in Europe as well as the United States.

            The title poem from the collection, COOKING LESSONS, pictures for us a young girl learning to cook. It is a labor of love and she dreams of someday writing the great Italo-American Novel of Love and Food.  In ROASTED PEPPERS, the poet shows us how the preparation of a particular food can bring back lovely memories and keep them alive.

            In the second part of the book entitled Tongues, Romano floods our minds with visions of LAKE GEORGE and wonders When did midsummer girls become sunbathed women? LOVER OF BASKETS brings us full circle from summertime in Circeo and the selection of suitable baskets to the present day when their use rekindles the memory of Corsican hillocks.

            LYCHEE NUTS & POMEGRANATES relates the very personal experience of a young girl coming of age in Brooklyn and her first Asian experience with the laundryman's son, knowing an almond stare could make me pregnant now.

            The third section, Food For Thought, brings us back once more to the relationship between the preparation of food and fond remembrances. In FORM AND THEORY the poet's mother teaches her to cook, lessons she treasures When my mother was still my mother, her kitchen feats were renowned, but are now a reverie.

            MY FEET OUTSIDE THE SHEET will touch a nerve for many a reader. The woman wants to run away, escape, but there is love to hold her in place. Real life intrudes again when we read inthebonds.com, a classic picture of modern living with Wall Street pearls and asks the now-famous question Is that your final answer? And we can all relate to LUCKY LIFE wherein the poet tells us that lucky life isn't one long story of horrors; there are moments of peace as I live between blows.

            The fourth section contains only two poems, THE CRUCIFIXION OF GARLIC, and AVE MARIA.   Both are spiritual musings and it is guaranteed you will never think of garlic in the same way again after reading about this messianic Superstar of herbs.
            Romano invites us to travel with her in the last part of the book and asks us to come along to witness exotic places. The section and the main poem from it is entitled CHAOS but there is nothing chaotic in the way the poet touches just the right scenes to let us into her world. Barefoot I enter a mosque in a cloche of veiled women with henna feet and palms. Later, in the poem IN MY HEART, IN MY BLOOD, she invites us  to travel to Turkey just to see twilight swagger on the Bosporus, to have my fortune read in coffee grounds.

            Romano s poem ALL MANNER OF THINGS is a powerful example of her diversity and creativity. The last line of this gem tears at the heart, The manner in which I turn around hearing you call me, Dad, though you're gone sixteen years.

            There are so many treasures to be found in COOKING LESSONS and they all have to do with love. It doesn t matter if it is the love that goes into preparing a meal for a beloved, or the love evoked by recollections of one who is no longer with us.

Review # 3
Cooking Lessons, Nina Romano
Rock Press, Editor Tracey Broussard
ISBN 978-0-9676748-7-2
$12.95, 100 Pages

COOKING LESSONS by NINA ROMANO
Reviewed by Serena McLean

Nina Romano's debut poetry 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.  To anyone who enjoys poetry, Cooking Lessons promises a feast. 

Romano is an acclaimed poet whose work has appeared in The Rome Daily American, The Chrysalis Reader, and Whiskey Island, among others.  She earned an M. F. A. in Creative Writing from Florida International University and teaches English at St. Thomas University. She is fluent in Spanish and Italian and both languages enrich her poems.
Like Mary Oliver s famous question, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life? Romano's poetry abounds with evocative questions about life.  She uses lyrical language to describe the world.  In the poem Cruising for example, Romano writes:           
a symphony of shafted beams coming toward me until a flashing red light makes me cease and desist, not persist.  But does anyone proceed with caution? 

Her poem Ave Maria brings to mind the nostalgia of lost love through the story of a woman who rides horseback once on a windswept hill and ate grapes, redder than cherries, so sweet their aftertaste almost bitter, not unlike memories of you.  

Reading Tonight makes you want to pack a bag and fly to Italy and the island of Sardinia as fast as possible. 
                           
I am docked beside an almost winner, the Azzurra and know exactly how she feels .There is nothing I cannot feel, Or do not know tonight.

Cooking Lessons is a book for anyone and everyone who enjoys food and travel.  It would certainly make a lovely gift.  It will appear in bookstores in June or can be ordered from Amazon.com.

Join Nina Romano for a reading and book signing at the Fraser Valley Library on Sunday, June 17, 2007 at 7 pm.  Romano will be joined by the members of her Screw Iowa! writing group, who will read from their works, including Colorado native Lauren Small, mystery writers Mariana Damon and Marnette Graff, and humorist Melissa Westemeier.  The event is free and open to the public and refreshments will be served.

NINA ROMANO INTERVIEW

Interview Questions: IQ
Nina Romano s responses: NR

IQ: What was your inspiration for this collection?
NR: My mother, landscapes of foreign and familiar places, people and food.

IQ: Have you really prepared each of these recipes?
NR: Yes, I have and more! Pasta with rose petals is a sure crowd pleaser.

IQ: How has having lived abroad for twenty years influenced your poetry?
NR: I published poetry almost daily for a year or so in the now defunct, Rome Daily American, an English newspaper for ex-patriots living in Rome and I think that early work was for the most part about living in Italy.  But apart from that, one could say that everything influenced my poetry during the years I lived abroad: the people I met, the Italian language, and certainly all the places I traveled to in and out of Italy.  I was fortunate to live in one of the most fascinating cites in Europe bella Roma!

IQ: Why don't Sicilian cooks ever give the exact amounts of ingredients called for in a recipe?
NR:  I learned to cook from my Grandma and my mother.  I watched them cook, and then I cooked. I think I used to taste things, maybe when I was around eleven years-old of so.  But I don t remember ever having to taste my cooking after that. Sicilians and probably most Italians just give the ingredients in the cooking, the assumption being, I think, that if you know how to cook, you ll sure know how to season and what amounts to use.  In Italy in 1975 I remember a Jewish friend from the Bronx married to an Italian and living in Rome, gave me her recipe for crostata, and the only measurement she gave me was about un etto, 100 grams, of butter. Everything else was just the ingredients and that's for baking, when usually most people are very precise.  See how Italy influences people?  And I never had a bad meal in or out of a restaurant while living there.

IQ: Your mother figures prominently in your collection. Did you come to any realizations about your relationship with her after writing the poems?  She was and is  my greatest friend and she's still with me, every day of my life till the day I die and hopefully if there's life after death even then.   

IQ: You write a lot about food. Why?
NR: Food is love and communion all in one. It s sharing a life source that keeps us going, and it also feeds the soul.  Italians are very family oriented, and there s nothing better than sitting around a table sharing well-prepared food, good wine, stories and family history that's as good as it gets.

IQ: Some people have confused you, the poet, with the persona of the poems.  Which poems are about you?
NR: They probably all have some elements of me, but some are definitely not me.  But, hey, isn't that part of the pleasure and fun of reading the poems to try and figure out which may be the author, and which are not? 

IQ: The obvious question, do you have fun cooking?
NR: I have cooked for joyous occasions and for sad.  I think when I cook mostly about writing, but other things too.  Believe it or not, I don t spend much time agonizing over what I m going to do in the kitchen.  Once I ve decided what I m going to make, I do it.  My kitchen and fridge are usually very well stocked.  I open the door, peer inside and get an idea.  That's simple.  I move fast one friend calls me a tornado, and I tell her, You should have seen me when I was young.  All members of my family are all gourmet eaters so it's easy to cook for them.  They are willing to try anything, and I love to experiment.  My nephew Stefano is the only one in the family who takes after me, and he's a fabulous chef. When he went away to college I gave him The Joy of Cooking, and some pretty wild other cook books for different occasions: Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Italian.  One year I gave him a boxed set to make sushi.  He's a delight to cook with and he mixes it all up Jamaican, French, you name it.
             
 
IQ:  Why did you decide to write these poems?
NR: I think of myself as a wordsmith.  I love language and I ve always written poems of sorts even when I was little.  I'd write love notes to my mother and father on holy cards and leave them on their night tables.  I wrote a poem called A Typical Teenager is a Teenager Atypical when I was thirteen I kept in a wallet for years. Sure wish I had a copy of that one!

IQ: But why these particular poems?
NR: When I was getting an MFA at FIU, and before I had Campbell McGrath for a poetry course, I used to meet him at functions and he'd tease me that eventually I'd have to face taking a course with him.  So in his first course I think he tried to pigeonhole me as a fiction writer, but I told him that I believe I have the soul of a poet, and just because I write fiction doesn't preclude the fact that I ve always written poetry unformed perhaps and lacking formal training and tutoring in the art form, but always.  I took Campbell for that course and perhaps 5 more.  The genesis of these poems was a summer course called: The First Book.   Some poems stayed, others were tossed.  I re-worked all of them many times.  At the time, though, I promised I could give him thirty-five pages and that's what I did.  And the smarty-pants thing I did, which paid off for me big time, was to give him all new work none he'd seen before.  I don't suffer or cry over poetry the way I do with fiction.  If someone critiques a poem I ve sent them, I just revise it.  If they don't like it, who cares?  I ll revise it or write another. Re-writing poems doesn't cost me that pound of flesh in the inkpot like fiction does that doesn't mean I think I'm a great poet either I just love to write poetry as a means of expression.  It actually helps my fiction because poetry has an inner energy it s a concise form that incorporates so much: rhythm, metaphor, precise images, concrete verbs, and much more.  Thank you, Campbell! 

IQ:  Are the poems autobiographical?
NR: This question is like the one about the confusion of the persona and the poet.  Let's say that these poems were born of some of my life experiences and others invented.
 
IQ: How do you write what is your process?
NR: I used to write long hand in the days of typewriters, and then I d transfer everything into print.  But now, I love to write on a computer.  I have files and files and put everything into the computer.

IQ: What kind of files?
NR: I have novels, short stories, several poem files listed under Campbell all at different stages of development, and files by year such as Poetry 2001, word files, image files, title files, workshop files, blurb files, agent files, you name it files: names of flowers, names of trees, names of people, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Cowboy files.  Name one, I probably have it.

IQ: Do you have a file on boats?
NR: Actually I have a list of possible names of boats.

IQ: Do you have a boat?
NR: We do, and her name is Makaira don t know how I came up with it, but it means blue marlin in Latin. The boats we've owned are great inspirations for poems, by the way.

IQ:  Where do you find inspiration other than the boat?
NR: In the air we breathe.  Everything around us is a poem.  I love nature.

IQ:  Which poets or writers have influenced you?
NR: Campbell, of course, though he writes popular culture and I hope I write lyrical at least that's what I m shooting for.  I have dozens of collections on my book shelves, and I like to read poetry before I write fiction I picked that little technique up from my mentor, fiction writer, John Dufresne.  I'm an eclectic poetry reader whatever or whoever strikes me at the moment: Michelangelo, Lousie Gluck, John Ashbuy, Martha Rhodes, Ellen Bryant Voight, Barbara Hamby, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver.  I like to read poetry by fiction authors, such as: Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates.  I enjoy the poetry of Denise Duhamel, Jim Daniels, Jesse Millner, Guo Liang and Elaine Winer.

IQ: Those are mostly poets, now for fiction writers, who has influenced your work?
NR: There are so many. I think everything you read influences your writing in some degree.  I love the Russians, most especially Tolstoy, Pasternak, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov; and the Chinese writers: Ha Jin, Yu Hua; and the Indians: Chitra Divakaruni, Amulya Malladi; and the Americans: Steinbeck, Melville, Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy; and the British: Thomas Hardy, John Donne, Kazuo Ishiguro, the Italians: Di Lampedusa, Primo Levi, Dacia Maraini. The short stories of Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, James Salter, Tim O Brien, John Dufresne and Lynne Barrett are incredible works of art.  Did I forget Shakespeare?

IQ: What are the titles of your favorite novels?
NR: Anna Karenina, Gone With the Wind, Cold Mountain, The Birth of Venus, The True History of the Kelly Gang, Forever.

IQ: What will you work on next?
NR: I'm currently writing a novel set in Russia, and revising another set in China.  I've also started another collection of poetry, wh