Praise Song

Alexa Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, 28, Tao Baja, Puerto Rico, February 24

Summer Taylor, 24, Seattle, July 4

Subhaga Crystal Bacon is the author of two volumes of poetry, Blue Hunger
(Methow Press, 2020) and Elegy with a Glass of Whisky (BOA Editions, 2004).
A cis-gender, Queer identified woman, she lives, writes, and teaches on the
east slope of the North Cascade Mountains, in Twisp, Washington.
— Read on www.humanaobscura.com/subhaga-crystal-bacon

Read and listen here.

I’m delighted to announce the release of my new collection of poems, Blue Hunger from Methow Press.  You can order a signed copy of the book from the Confluence Poets Store.

Here’s some advance praise for the book:

Initially, the poems in Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s fine book show her keen eye for delivering the natural world. It’s tempting to think of her as a naturalist, but as her book progresses it becomes clear that, more broadly, she’s a human nature poet; poems of love and loss and community occur with the same acute precision. For example, in “Awake at Night” . . . she begins this way, “I feel beautiful, young and dying/as the cricket song lifts and calls/and you are far away. No happiness/like this…” All in all, a wonderful collection.

–Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Pagan Virtues.

Grounded in the beloved Pacific Northwest, Blue Hunger is an account of a soul’s journey, “empty of longing./Luminous, lambent.” In this world where grief merges with love, so does the poet merge “with that great distance.” Each moment and season in a life is carefully observed, and Bacon’s world abounds with raspberries, garlic, choke-cherry, jays, owl, deer, lizards: a “tunnel of loss.” . . .” Blue Hunger is a book—a place—I will revisit again and again because “What I remember most was the flavor of those words, scented with lost possibilities.”

–Jennifer Martelli, author of The Uncanny Valley and My Tarantella

These poems show the love for one’s vision of nature as the shifter of shapes. All of the landscape’s Thingness–as Rilke saw it–ebbs and looms here, and Bacon follows their rhythmic changes. Bacon builds an album that honors the universe’s traffic, the gaze melting to honey. In these poems, the economies of silence, well: The lotus has its foot in the mud.

–Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Futureless Languages

In these intimate, meticulous, compassionate poems, Bacon seamlessly marries the self with the world . . . of wild rivers and dark trees, of coyotes and hawks, of snow and summer grasses— or the human body, with its love, its aging, and its griefs . . . With a deep mixture of curiosity and vulnerability . . .  Bacon sings of our human hungers— “diligent, defended, devout”— with wild consciousness.

-Kenneth Hart, author of Uh Oh Time