Auguries & Divinations, winner of the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, tracks a young woman’s coming of age, attuned to the unspoken liabilities of women’s lives, the suburban underworld, and the energies of eros. The narrator claims a life of her own making, drawing on the classical practice of augury, or observing birds to discern human fate.
“Heather Treseler’s poetry pulses with lyric intensity and shines with sleek polish—craft and sensuality cooperating in compact stanzas to render the seasons, landscapes, sex, and the creative bonds between women with remarkable immediacy and power. This is a beautifully poised, authoritative debut.”
— LANGDON HAMMER, author of James Merrill: Life and Art and the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University
“Heather Treseler is compelling. We immediately want to listen to her the way we might listen to a lyric singer full of melody and rhythm. But make no mistake, running through all her lyricism is a staring, unblinking intelligence that informs us about what she sees. Her vision is inclusive, generous, wide-ranging, and enthralling.”
— BRAD CRENSHAW, judge of the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and author of Chased by Lunacies and Wonders
“Heather Treseler is a calm anatomist of many things—family, suburbs, ordinariness, human love in its multiple manifestations, museums, ancient Rome—but the surface of her poems covers often startling, deep, painful, even murderous depths. Her tidy-looking stanzas are poised to explode.”
— WILLARD SPIEGELMAN, author of Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt and the Hughes Professor of English, emeritus, at Southern Methodist University