The Blue Bridge - by Maurya Simon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A groundbreaking journey celebrating nature's diversity, family ties, and female power, and lamenting both our human and environmental losses.

Maurya Simon's twelfth volume of poems, The Blue Bridge, is a literary tour de force that bears witness to the twenty-first century's dire and lasting dangers brought about by human folly and greed. At the same time that it laments species loss, it honors the enduring lives of small creatures, and the perseverance and adaptability of larger animals. Simon also charts the journey of her own life in an America that is increasingly marked by violence and division, as well as by the ameliorating and lasting ties between people. At turns philosophical, playful, irreverent, and passionate, this book showcases a poet's work at the peak of her powers, as she illuminates how the bonds between spirit and flesh, and each other, sustain us.

Review Quotes

"Maurya Simon's The Blue Bridge uses language to approach non-human sentience and radically altering perspective and relationships. Animals and plants have different awarenesses than we do, and interpret different wavelengths of light and sound through instinct that is different from human choice-making. If the starting position is that poetry is about possibility, then The Blue Bridge definitely brings us across it from here to another place. Simon's poems are miniature bulbs, prey animals hiding in brush, or predators diving. They are physical in their attention to pain, aging, the female body, philosophy, trips to India, the mind of a zombie, the history of eyebrows, and other multiple worlds real and imagined. The Blue Bridge really is the book I was waiting to read."

--Sean Singer, Today in the Taxi

"As we witness the alarming decline of our planet's health, we become overwhelmed by despair, anger, defeat, and the anxiety of impending loss--feelings that seep into our everyday lives and relationships. But Maurya Simon reminds us, 'rather than being diminished by our pain, we're enlarged by a clarity grief brings.' It's an empowering wisdom that fortifies Simon's incandescent poems in The Blue Bridge, a gorgeous and profound book that locates strength in our most vulnerable moments, and beauty in our darkest moods."

--Rigoberto González

"'Something I can't quite name is missing, ' Maurya Simon muses in these lyrical meditations on loss--our loss of elders, ecosystems, and perhaps even faith 'worn / so thin and ragged it's nearly diaphanous.' A book of warnings (the prescient 'In an eyelid's blink, a match put to these woods / could cause a conflagration so vast / it would smoke out the Milky Way, char our lives / beyond recognition') and prayerful laments ('So brief our days among / the holy beauties'), The Blue Bridge confronts the effects of 'severing ourselves from nature' in poems sorrowful, enraged, sometimes humorous, and always craft-wise, demonstrating how we are 'enlarged by a clarity grief brings.' For several decades Simon has been writing generous and deeply felt poems toward becoming 'unconscious // of the joys I've planted in others.' The Blue Bridge may be the culmination of such selfless and sensual engagement with the word and the world."

--Michael Waters, Sinnerman

About the Author

Maurya Simon's The Blue Bridge, is her twelfth volume of poems. La Sirena: A Novella in Verse (2024), an earlier volume, was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee. Simon's collection, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Independent Booksellers Association's Gold Medal in Poetry. Simon's opera, "Tamar," based on her verse libretto, with music composed by French American composer, Eliane Aberdam, premiered at the University of Rhode Island. A Fulbright Senior Research Fellow (South India), NEA Poetry Fellow, and a Poetry Society's Lucille Medwick Memorial and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awardee, she's served residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Baltic Centre for Writers & Translators (Visby, Sweden), Hawthornden Castle (Edinburgh, Scotland), the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Santa Cruz, CA), and at the MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH). Simon's poems have been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, Rumanian, Bengali, Greek, and Farsi. She serves as a Professor Emerita in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside.