The Blue Bridge

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.

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.