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• ASIN: B0F2P6BNB5
• Publisher: Etruscan Press
• Publication date: March 3, 2026
• Language: English
• Print length: 109 pages
• ISBN-13: 979-8990767829
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.
Praise & Reviews
“How can it be, dear sister, that we ache with such tenderness for what we’ve lost, knowing that nothing returns without being altered irretrievably”
Whether it’s a lament and its trailing ache, or the “tallying” that Ulysses undertakes while facing isolation and reaching for his ration, Maurya Simon’s The Blue Bridge weaves through essential literatures and mythologies, absorbing the lessons we need to navigate present public and private challenges and journeys. We might realize—especially now—while reading these deeply contemplative and crafted poems: What is the world without storytelling? How do we learn and settle into family, morality, and grief and its narrative truths as the world empties out of time? Simon teaches us what poetry, and its storytelling, requires: her poems, full of so much wisdom and clairvoyance, are alive and sentient in how they chronicle domesticity, affection, the body’s beauty, aging, suffering and grief, with the clarity of deep seeing: “My husband’s body hurts constantly from arthritis, but his brain writhes from American politics.” This edge of “writhing” holds the poems to a discerning light where we engage as wholly as we must in the keening and tenderness of her vision. –Prageeta Sharma, Grief Sequence
“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