Black Ocean, which published Fossils in the Making, is celebrating its 20 year anniversary! I’ll be reading with a few other Black Ocean authors at Green Apple Books in San Francisco (on 9th Ave) at 7pm on Thursday Sept. 3rd. I hope to see you there! More info / RSVP here.
I got to talk about my research on how to manage the gas transition and build out clean energy infrastructure on the energy podcast, Volts. You can check out the podcast on your favorite app or view the transcript and listen to the show here.
What we have right now is this top-heavy system. It’s like this spinning top that has started to wobble and it’s the inertia of the past that’s keeping it going. But we have too much investment up top and not enough utilization at the bottom. That’s going to continue to wobble. Once the momentum runs out, the costs aren’t going to disappear. Instead, the people left on the system the longest are going to be shouldering those accelerating costs. That’s the importance of managing the transition so it doesn’t happen that way.
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.