Blue Hunger

Initially, the poems in Subhaga Crystal Bacon's in this collection 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" (one of her complicated love poems) 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. The maples launch /their spinning seeds, such joy / in the deep air..." All in all, a wonderful collection.

Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pagan Virtues

Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a 1995 graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers with a degree in Poetry. Her first book, Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, won the 2003 BOA Editions New Poetry America Prize. Since that time, her work has appeared in a variety of print and online journals. A dramatic shift in consciousness in 2011 brought her into seamless contact with awareness and perception such that she stopped writing for a period of years. Moving to the Methow Valley in 2014 and joining the Confluence Poets reinvigorated her creative process, resulting in many of the poems in this manuscript. She is a teacher in the Trillium Awakening spiritual path and lives and creates in the spacious North Cascade Mountains with her partner, Sugandhi Katharine Barnes.