Parturition
Winner of the 2019 Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Prize from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland
From the Book Jacket:
"It has been years since I have read a new poet of such rhetorical sophistication and mastery. Wow. One thinks of the young Robert Lowell. Rhetorical mastery fueled by fury and necessity. Agony shaped and released by intelligence, by art. A breathtaking debut." - Frank Bidart
"Heather Treseler is a poet of controlled wildness, of measured intensities. These poems register the vulnerable body, contingencies of touch, the complex fatedness of female (and not only female) bodies. Ranging from intimate address to erotic encounter to narrative unspooling, these are poems of queer reticulation, formidably yet open-heartedly propelled through those nets we call history, politics, geography, and the sensorium. Treseler encompasses the 'tang of the silverbell,' medieval lyric, the ambiguous border where land meets the sea. She is a poet of American location, whether Louisiana, St. Louis, or New England; she is also a poet committed to the specificity of others-- their bodies, experiences, longings, injuries, as they meet and shape our own. Her centerpiece elegiac 'Lucie Odes' become a devotional work of concentrated, ramifying attentiveness. Treseler finds in 'songs' necessity / a midwinter music.' Like Elizabeth Bishop, like Frank Bidart, Treseler makes a mode of scrupulous attention its own kind of passion." - Maureen N. McLane
"With elegance and unwavering intelligence, Heather Treseler's poems quietly dazzle. Grounded in the body, Parturition expands our notions of birth, death, and the 'shared violence' that connects them." - Martha Collins
Recipient of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize (2020) from the New England Poetry Club:
"Born of loss and longing, the poems in Heather Treseler’s chapbook Parturition—a medical term for childbirth—embody Yeats’s idea of 'passionate syntax for passionate subject matter.' As she explores birth in various guises (the imagined birth of a child, the birth of insight, the birth of yearning), she simultaneously reveals how the attempt to verbalize the experience of 'step[ping] beyond self and hunger' becomes a kind of parturition. I was mesmerized by her intricate layering of phrases and clauses to convey, extend, qualify, and complicate thought and feeling. Artful and sensuous, her sentences are 'doors that open to rapture or // metaphor: a chance to be momentarily carried across into somewhere, something, someone else.' I keep returning to these verses she has mothered, and I am honored to select this collection, her labor of love, for the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize."
- José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes, contest judge and author of Present Values
Selected Reviews:
Alyse Knorr in Poetry Northwest
Alexandra Mayer in Green Mountains Review
Aida Muratoglu in The Critical Flame
Ella Schmidt in Notre Dame Review
