NEW ROTTERDAM QUARTET

2021 / Bellus Books / 201 pages / purchase

Four short stories about life in New Rotterdam. Two high schoolers try to be cool, a young fellow joins the Navy to see the world, a rounder manages an art colony, and the New Rotterdam baseball team, the Smelt, are examined.

THANKS, JOAQUIN A COMIC NOVEL

2015 / Bellus Books / 186 pages / purchase

Excerpt > At this time in my life I did not know why it was that I was set upon this earth other than to experience enjoyment’s natural span. I cared nothing for reason, other than it existed to serve my pleasurable needs. Nor did I think the moral life was anything but a list of proscriptions handed down by men who were essentially joyless and unbold. To be candid, had I been in charge of the Old Testament, the pagans would have won and we’d still be dancing around a golden goat with wineskins draped around our shoulders. There is nothing I cared more about than the successful pursuit of elation and lust. —Ambrose Berg, Epicurean Utopian

aphorisms & APHORISMS II

2012 / Round Bend Press / 58 pages purchase — 2013 / Bellus Books / 56 pages / purchase

The author of An Establishment of Change: Poems, 1974-1994 and Morandi's Bottles, presents a collection rooted in the tradition of the philosophical quip--or aphorism. With clarity and precision, K. C. Bacon presents a concise worldview that rings true in form and message, creating an uncompromising work of art that announces the meaning of what it is to be awake and alive.

moon over new rotterdam A tale

2012 / Round Bend Press / 104 pages / purchase

Excerpt > Augustine reached over to the passenger seat, picked up his sketchpad, got out of the car and immediately put his right foot into a mud puddle, sinking to his ankle. It felt like fate. Shaking his leg as he walked to the front door, the cool verge of a squall bit into his face and a dog howled somewhere in the dark. The moment he opened the door, a blast of stale beer and cigarettes, mingling with a hint of cleaning fluid, hit him. Hitching up his soaked pant leg, Augustine allowed a cynical hiss to whisper towards the bar as he walked in. "Ah, New Rotterdam. I'm home." Then Augustine Jones, veteran of little success and much failure, of trouble and toil, of love and far less, a painter, a poet, a stock market buffoon, and now Brown International's new manager of grain loading operations-a gestalt of his own-made, as his first official homecoming act, a beeline to the Linger Longer Bar & Grill's john.

an establishment of change poems, 1974–1994

2012 / Round Bend Press / 104 pages / purchase

Some thirty poems culled from the work of Tacoma artist and poet K.C. Bacon; a telling work that documents an artist's vision and the change anyone with artistic aspirations must be willing to accept in the quest to tell the truth. These poems represent nothing less than the evolution of one man's consciousness and growth as an artist.

morandi's bottles POEMS

2011 / Round Bend Press / 58 pages / purchase

Being a painter, it is not by mere chance that K. C. Bacon references the twentieth-century Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), both as a kind of homage and a jumping-off point in the development of his recent thinking about art, and, by extension, his most recent poems