I’m very excited about this altogether different kind of writing project: a children’s book! Through my work with the Building Decarbonization Coalition, I wrote a book about how workers transform a neighborhood from using fossil fuels to clean energy. I collaborated with the climate artist Nicole Kelner, who created the most amazing watercolor illustrations for the story. And: the book is bilingual! It was translated into Spanish by José Torres. Be sure to check it out here.
I’m happy to have a new batch of poems in the print edition of Colorado Review (Spring 2025), edited by Matthew Cooperman. “Threat Multiplier,” “Cause,” “Inc.” and “Indicator Species” are from a manuscript in progress called “Threat Multiplier.” Threat Multiplier is a militaristic term that denotes how climate change creates additional vulnerabilities and augments “security risks.” This set of poems deconstructs that framework and examines the daily, historic, systemic threats that contribute to harming the people, places, and creatures made vulnerable through the extractive practices that preceded and produced climate change.
A preview below. Buy the issue at Colorado Review.
You can now purchase some of my zines and risographs at common meter press, a micropress and zine distro based out of the PNW. Check out their collection here.
I have a new risograph poem available called “Placenta.” The print is a composite of three organic placenta prints made by my doula after the birth of my child earlier this year. Email me if you’d like a print!
I had the pleasure of having some of my zines included in the recent book arts exhibit at the Kondos Gallery at Sacramento City College. Curated by Eric Wood and Emily Wilson, the show ran from March 20-April 20, 2023. Below are a couple images of the show.
Grateful for Jillian A Fantin’s astute review of Fossils in Sage Cigarettes Magazine. Fantin writes:
By the end, we discover Kristin George Bagdanov’s collection is one rife with dualities: scientific and lyric, objective and subjective, individual and collective. Though these aforementioned dualities initially appear paradoxical in nature, Bagdanov subverts her reader’s expectations by combining these dualities within her particularly crafted forms. In doing so, she explores individual and collective bodies and our current ecological epoch through the lens of an intimate speaker.
Read the rest here.
Poetry Flash published a review of Fossils in the Making in January 2022, though it’s only just come to my attention (hence, the delayed post!). Rosalinda Monroy writes:
Fossils in the Making is an account of our failure to come to terms with our bodies as both a thing of beauty and a thing of destruction. The discordance we experience upon realizing that our bodies have the capacity to consume, pollute, exploit and destroy so many other bodies, while also having the capacity to feel sadness, desire, awe, and even love for those same bodies, is an idea the speaker grapples with repeatedly in this text.
–“Measuring Crisis,” Monroy.
Read the rest here.
Several years ago I had the pleasure of participating in the “broadsides on the bus” public art exhibit in Moscow, Idaho, during which a local artist made a broadside of one of my poems that then adorned the public buses for some time.
The press that orchestrates these visual / textual collaborations, Broadsided Press, has reviewed the book in which that poem later appeared–Fossils in the Making–and asked me some questions about my poetry:
Kristin George Bagdanov’s Fossils in the Making reminds me that, at their best, poetry and science are inherently inseparate pursuits. In the tradition of many contemporary poets and their predecessors trying to make sense of living in, looking at, and loving a world that’s also semi-constantly on the verge (or in the midst) of its own unmaking, Fossils offers poems that meditate and meander, that question and sing. This is a book that looks hard at this world in all its complications and somehow lands on something that doesn’t feel quite cynical—there’s joy in these pages, as well as real, difficult reckoning. I’m saying I loved it: I will try to say why.
Read the full interview and review by Joely Fitch here.
new risograph broadside of my zine poem “after the amplify energy oil spill,” which you can see in zine form here.
Contact me if you’d like a copy. Requesting a couple bucks to cover shipping.
After reading Animal’s People by Indra Sinha and The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser in short succession, I started wondering just how many people companies like Union Carbide had killed with little to no consequence. This zine is a way of visualizing that continuously deferred web of corporate responsibility. Send me a message if you’d like me to mail you one!
