Praise For Bruce Pratt's Novel

The Serpents of Blissfull

The Serpents of Blissful is a wonderful read--well-drawn characters, intriguing setting, strong but subtle writing. The narrator, Isaac "Ize" Butts--no'count drunkard, veteran, and born-again Christian who joins the snake-handling Star of Morning Church--has a marvelous voice, a voice at once gritty and poetic, earthy and insightful, a voice that is as real and unique as the mountain "hollers" from which it came. Though the novel travels some familiar territory--moonshine-running hillbillies, psalm-singing, river-baptizing Christians, and the backwoods culture of Dickey's Deliverance--in Pratt's skillful and sympathetic hands, Butts' narrative is completely fresh, filled with insight, compassion, subtlety, and power.
Michael C White

Bruce Pratt knows the broken hearts and minds of the backwoods, and in this book he gives us a darkly funny and brilliant portrait of a down-but-never-out misfit struggling for a toehold in life’s craggy hills. The moonshiners, drug runners, and snake-handling religious fanatics who populate the ridges and valleys around Blissfull, West Virginia may be an idiosyncratic bunch, but they have much to teach us about endurance, loyalty, and love. Not since The Beans of Egypt Maine has there been a book so true to it sense of place. The Serpents of Blissfull is an absolute winner.

Clint McCown

Bruce Pratt’s poems are smart and accomplished. He keeps a close watch on the natural world, and an even closer one on human nature. Boreal is a collection which extends pleasure to insight on every page.

Gerald Costanzo

A memorable outpouring of passion and paradox, Pratt’s pitch-perfect poems entwine uncertainties into a retrospective which rather than striking back at experience, holds it gracefully, gratefully, close at hand. Again and again I’m drawn back into these poems of faith, deeply rooted in a man standing firm, chest-deep in the current of each passing, uncertain moment, any desire to be rescued not out of fear but because someone looked for you and not finding you where you should be / dove into the waves for love.

Dzvinia Orlowsky