Demimonde won the WILLA award in the Poetry category from Women Writing the West. The judges, professional librarians had this to say:

“An astonishing achievement of research and imagination. Demimonde has it all: masterful writing, harsh beauty, political consciousness, poems that make sense alone and together, each precisely chosen. This collection is accessible and yet utterly startling.”

“I felt transported through a sepia-colored dream into the lives of women who kept a place of beauty in their hearts, despite the travails of life.”

“These are the songs of saloon girls and prostitutes working the mining camps of the old west— mocking and lyrical, forlorn, ragged, radiant with hunger and cruelty. Check out their clean lines and spikey language, their gunfire and laudanum and perfume.”

–Joseph Millar, author of Overtime and Blue Rust

“Kierstin Bridger amazes me with the pure energy that she is able to bring to everything in her life, including poetry. Seamus Heaney called poetry psychic fossil fuel, and Kierstin works that mine, pickaxing coal, finding diamonds. Demimonde is a collection about the dimly–lit world of women who sold their attention and bodies to survive the nineteenth century in the West. What sets Bridger apart as a poet in a densely populated literary world is not only her robust narrative, coupled with growing wisdom, but the way she is able to build , in a manner that often seems effortless, startling and unique clusters of language. I don’t know another poet writing today who is able to fashion language into such radiant new symmetries. I look forward to watching her comet trail blaze forth into the world of poetry.”

–Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature and A Fish to Feed All Hunger

“The history of the West has a submerged narrative. Beneath the story of conquest and destiny are stories of despair, desire, abuse and loss— women’s stories that are finally given lyric voice in Demimonde. “This is the land/ where ladders fall away,” where hope and aspiration are used up, where lives are bought and sold. These are stories of “our other selves/ selves we’d want saved.” With language that is sonorous, rich and compassionate, Bridger imagines these women back to life, and when we see them lifted out of their oppression, we understand our history in a new way, not storied by men but storied and sung by women, unmuffled, fierce, courageous and compassionate, finally liberated in a burst of gorgeous and sorrowful poetry.”

–Lisa Allen Ortiz, author of Self Portrait As A Clock and Turns Out

“This is an amazing collection of poems, spoken in the first-person voices of girls and young women who worked in the mining town “sporting houses” of Telluride around the turn of the last century. Kierstin Bridger’s vivid, unsparing language captures the desperation, tedium and pathos of the day-to-day lives of these women in words and images that burn indelibly into the mind and sear the reader’s soul like a branding iron. She has the poet’s unerring eye for the minute, telling details that reveal not only the physical experiences of these women, but their acute, matter-of-fact perception of those experiences and their hopeless acceptance of the inescapable lives that encompass them. Ms. Bridger so fully and intimately inhabits these women, her poems are not about them, they are of them and from them.”

–Jack H. Watson, White House Chief of Staff, 
Carter Administration

In lyric work that spans from the oil fields of Colorado to the hollers of Kentucky, Bridger’s All Ember pulls us through the burning embers of life itself. In these poems forests and bodies sing the rhythms and offer up the vistas that life affords us all. It is a gritty and truthful ode about roots that dig deep into the earth itself.

Praise for All Ember:

“There is the map of who we are, and there’s another of whom we are supposed to be. But cartography is not taught to girls. So we take the wheel, hit the gas, and careen blindly past signs along the way: Slippery When Wet. Narrow Shoulder. Dead End. Suddenly we are women, unable to read the language of our own bodies, hear the tympani of our own hearts. In All Ember, Kierstin Bridger charts the course by dropping not breadcrumbs (we know how that one turned out), but hot, glowing coals. This elegant and gritty collection defies the three-part journey of the elevated, armored hero—bowing instead to daughters deep in moist forest duff, a way toward love that is not sailed, but crawled.”

-Amy Irvine author of Trespass, winner of the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award

“Bridger, crafts for us a world that is filled with the memory of youth and its long reach into adulthood. These poems are crafted by a mother, a daughter, a woman whose vision is of the interwoven, the profound, the sacred, and the impure. These poems take us from Kentucky to Colorado, from oil field to basketball court, from savory to sweet. She does what all great poets do, she moves her readers through fire, aching and fear toward healing. All Ember is, at its core, a series of odes to the body; Bridger, brings the feminine, the feminist and the female into a brilliant and inexhaustible light. Her sensory gifts are on full display in every poem; coupled with her brilliant ear, the succinct and subtle tones of these poems are unique and universal.”

–Aaron A. Abeyta, winner of the American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award for Colcha

“Gorgeous, erudite and honest and… buxom. Electric with life really.”

-Lisa Allen Ortiz Author of Guide to The Exhibit Winner of the Perguia Press Award

“My feeling about Kierstin has been, from the first, that in being unafraid to speak the truth for and about herself, she has grown into a poet who is able, as real poets must, to speak for all of the rest of us as well.”

– David St. John author of New and Selected Poems nominated for the National book Award