In Indigo, Ellen Bass deepens her mastery of the praise poem, exploring the duality of loss and exquisite tenderness that lives at the heart of almost everything. Bass plumbs the miraculous from the stuff of life—the grit of oysters, taking an old dog out to pee in the night, shopping at Ross. In a series of aching love poems, the mundanity of marriage gives way to vivid sensuality, even as—under the weight of age and illness—Eros bends its neck to grieve what will be lost. A lifelong advocate for those who might otherwise go without a witness, Bass shows her compassion in these pages. She offers the ragged, beautiful world her steady attention, her devastating precision. Graceful in their melding of the narrative and the lyric, gorgeous in their complexity, these are poems to be savored.
“Indigo plants in any reader the need to turn the page, to know more even if it means more heartbreak. You hold in your hands the work of a sorceress at the height of her powers.”
“You may have to break/ your heart, writes Ellen Bass, but it isn’t nothing/ to know even one moment alive. That complex tenant of faith underlies every poem in this superb book, an inquiry into what it is to be present in the physical world, in time, a body in the world of bodies. Bass’s poems are surprising, tender, hungry and wide awake, fearless in their attention to every nuance of feeling. I love this book wholeheartedly.”
“These poems play like snippets of cinema from every woman’s life story. Indigo is our soundtrack, finally, [with] its addictive and merciless music. This book is merely brilliant.”
Reviews
Named one of the most anticipated poetry collections of 2020 by 
Named a New & Notable Book by 
“Ranging from the surreal when the front of the house is lifted off the foundation, leaving the couple exposed to the world to the lyric and the narrative, her poems have a startling range. They’re funny, poignant, sad, distraught, angry, tender—a whole range of emotions. In short, they’re very human and affirm our common humanity. When you read her poems, you feel as if you’ve walked, as she has, though many lives unflinching at what they have to offer us about our humanity. She is one of our major poets for a good reason. Not just because she’s a deft craftsman but because she is what one of my favorite children’s book—The Velveteen Rabbit—calls the rabbit once it has arrived at being fully itself—she’s real. And that is not something easy to come by these days.” —Bruce SpangerThe Los Angeles Review
“A bold and passionate new collection… Intimacy is rarely conveyed as gracefully as in Bass’s lustrous poems.” —Booklist
“Bass’s work—about marriage and parenting, illness and recovery, small daily pleasures—cultivates an exuberance that’s born of, and balanced by, close watchfulness.” —The New York Times
“Extraordinary. . . . Indigo (Copper Canyon Press) is in dialogue with the meat of mortal existence—birth and death, mourning and desire—and Bass holds these polarities, often within a single poem, illustrating how they link us not only to each other, but also to the inexorable revolutions of the natural world of which we are only a small part.” —The Adroit Journal
“For me, this book is an instant classic, one of those I will carry around dog-eared and tattered from so much love. Readers will be captured by the intimate human moments, and poets will gorge themselves on the careful, attentive craft Bass brings to each piece.” —Women’s Voices for Change
“The poetry of Ellen Bass, if there’s a way to capture such expansive, startling, and honest work, is like that: something as primary as water suddenly sounding its newest blessing because you chose to pay attention; were, for a moment, willing to hear it on its own terms.” —World Literature Today
“In Ellen Bass’s new work, we should look not for formal breaks or radical shifts in subject matter, but for a deepening sensibility and expanded agility in applying the tools of her craft. . . . As much as artistry, it is the grunt work of the poet, her relentless, quotidian processing of experience, that results in a lustrous artifact.” —VIDA: Women in Literary Arts
“[A] genius for detail shines through Indigo—an iridescent thread that gives pleasure over and over, no matter the subject of the poem. . . . Indigo engages the reader with its willingness to face the contradictions of being a human being head-on.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The writing balances tenderness with exactness, gently reminding readers to live with courage and empathy in our broken world.” —The Washington Post
“The poems in Indigo flow in ways that only Bass’s can—stopping the world with their movements, both rapturous in their celebration and exultant in their heartbreak.” —BOMB Magazine