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