Parturition

Parturition traces the birth of a poet's necessity. These poems grapple with hunger-for knowledge and erotic sustenance, for freedom and metamorphosis-against the hard limits of late capitalism. From the bayous of Baton Rouge to the streets of St. Louis, from a Concord kettle pond to the coastline of southern Maine, the poet traces the exiling force of desire, exploring what it might mean for a woman "to have and to hold" herself.

"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 silverbell, ' medieval lyric, the ambiguous border where land meets 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

"'Bear ing] the instrument of her making, ' Treseler journeys us, with a virtuosic fever pitch, through empire's wrecked postscript-offering us a thrilling new lyric imaginary that upends the 'radical difference' between rapture and metaphor, being and otherness, state and self." - Virginia Konchan

"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

Parturition received 1st prize in the 2019 Fool For Poetry International Chapbook Competition. Heather Treseler's poems appear in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, PN Review, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and her essays about poetry appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and in six books about American poetry. She is an associate professor of English and the Presidential Fellow for Art, Education, and Community at Worcester State University and a Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center.