CAPTURING CALIFORNIA’S COAST: SANTA CRUZ POET LAUNCHES DEBUT POETRY COLLECTION

“Alive with style and filled with beautiful, nostalgic imagery. Bruce’s free verse poetry is rich with detail, and her evocative language will stay with you long after reading this collection. Deeply introspective and profoundly insightful, each poem displays great thematic range and literary sensibility.” – J. Rodriguez, Film Producer and Artist

 “Haunting and provocative while simple and natural. The author’s amazing gift of poetic writing and presentation cannot be missed.”  – Linda Harper, Author

SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA, January 27^th — Local author Bri Bruce of Santa Cruz will release her debut collection of poems The Weight of Snow: New & Selected Poems on February 1, 2014 as the first work of Black Swift Press’s California Writers assemblage. She is planning a book launch party this spring that will include other local authors, artists, and creative minds.

Bruce, a freelance editor, graphic designer, photographer, and graduate of UC Santa Cruz’s literature department, has been working toward publishing her first collection of poetry for five years. Her work has appeared in dozens of magazines and literary publications, including Santa Cruz’s phren-Z and The Monterey Poetry Review. Last winter she was bestowed with the opportunity to read her work at the Museum of Art History in downtown Santa Cruz and was chosen for both the Wellspring House and the Centrum Foundation writer’s residencies. In addition, she is the owner of Bri Bruce Productions, a writing, editing, and graphic design company based out of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

San Francisco author and publisher Kermit Heartsong calls Bruce’s work, “Evocative, powerful, and transporting,” and the collection as a whole is “a poignant and beautiful story of a life, experiences, memories, and pain. Ms. Bruce is truly a gifted poet.”

Written in the vein of Mary Oliver, May Sarton, and the late Santa Cruz poet Maude Meehan, Bruce’s poems are inspired by California’s breathtaking Pacific coast and inland coastal regions. In her collection, she explores the many plights of the human species, from the mysteries of the heart and the inescapability of death, to the depths of human emotion. Told from the perspective of a poetic naturalist, Bruce shares her appreciation of the wild, illuminating the profound in the mundane while chronicling the natural world as both an observer and an irrefutable part of it. Her poems focus strongly on image and locality, conjuring the imaginations of readers and celebrating the beauty in the follies of the human condition.

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