Barbara Bloom, who recently relocated to Bellingham, Washington, shares poems about the deep connection she finds in nature, especially in Santa Cruz, where she lived for over 30 years. Barbara studied poetry with Santa Cruz poets, Joe Stroud and Morton Marcus and taught in the English Department of Cabrillo College for nearly 30 years. In this episode, Barbara reads and discusses poems of departure and the reassurance of perpetual presence in the natural world--a theme that permeates her Santa Cruz poems as well as those about her teenage years with her family on a coastal homestead in British Columbia, Canada. She is a member of the local Hummingbird Poetry Collective and has two volumes of poetry: On the Water Meridian (2007) and Pulling Down the Heavens (2017), both published by Hummingbird Press.