Advance praise for The Beatitudes:

"Frank Lima has long been one of our finest poets. His new collection The Beatitudes is one of his strongest. Lima is not satisfied to make expressive transcriptions of experience. His language challenges itself, using wit to create reversals of expected meaning and discourse. His new religious poems may seem subversive of accepted norms, but actually they do what a living religious sensibility should do; they take seriously the idea of a personal relation with divinity, cutting through decorum to raise the tough questions that give religion its primal standing as a mode of truth beyond dogma."

"Frank Lima is a traditionalist; he likes to wrestle with God. He also fights with angels, poets and priests, and he often wins. As a teenager he wrote the most poignant poetry of the street. He didn't like being cornered there, so he conquered a hundred other tones. In his new work he draws the daily crucifixions for everyone. He is turbulent against every bad dogma, every false infinity. His iconoclastic boxing with the sacred makes him all the less profane. Frank O'Hara's true heir, he keeps up that poet's love of extraordinary liberty. Bliss, pain, and good humor of writing human poems. A national treasure largely unknown, Lima's blessings enlarge us all."

"In the realm of the senses and their spiritual shadows no other contemporary poet incorporates such auratic power. What's the trick here? What's the secret of the religious/sensory magic Frank stirs up in these profane canticles, badder than one hundred bad lieutenants, brighter than the flood of a gypsy moon? "Does it matter as long as it's breathtaking?"

"Frank Lima's The Beatitudes is inspired by a Jesus not of Nazareth and no Superstar but the guy who "collects the tickets at the door,/wipes the seats clean" in a Heaven where "there are no books that mention your name or mine." His Holy Father passes wind and has genital hair. Somebody say "Amen"! This is Jesus of the New York School calling, leaving you messages where you screen your calls. Pick up!"

"In the most exciting religious poetry since Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, Frank Lima brings contemporary sensibility and preoccupations to the age-old conflict between spirit and flesh that has always animated discussions of Catholicism. Like a twisted nephew of Lorca, Lima takes his New York School roots straight into fantastic, hip streets only a pugilist chef could temper. With burning language, Lima makes Jesus Christ a living man."

"Frank Lima's poetry is born of hard experience and wild imagination. Vivid, surreal, startling, at times hilarious, Lima is a holy blasphemer, belonging to the tradition of the heretic who fearlessly asserts a new faith in the face of dogma, He is a true original."

Frank Lima was born in New York City in Spanish Harlem, 1939. His parents were Mexican and Puerto Rican. He received a Master's from Columbia University in 1975. During the 60s and 70s he published three books of poetry selections of which can be found in Inventory (Hard Press 1997). Trained in his youth, in classical French cooking, he is now a teacher at the New York Restaurant School.