Description
Auguries & Divinations tracks a young woman’s coming-of-age, attuned to the unspoken rules (and liabilities) of women’s lives, the suburban underworld, and the energies of eros. An older woman, Lucie, becomes the narrator’s Beatrice in love and survival, and she returns to New England seasoned and ready to claim a life of her own making, drawing on her study of the love lyric—from Catullus to Frank Bidart—and the classical practice of augury, or observing the birds to discern human fate.
Brad Crenshaw, in choosing the book for the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, notes: “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.”
Some notable reviews for Auguries & Divinations have been:
“[Heather Treseler] captures the sinister underbelly of suburbia, its quiet perversions, its everyday violations, transgressions, repressions, “a silence as lethal/ as measles,” where the slow-road peace of the cul-de-sac brings to mind drowned kittens, or rabbits, or sickly children. Anne Sexton lives between the lines here, and in them, too, “peering in windows/ wide-eyed, alert, not a stitch under her skirt.” There’s a searching quality to the poems, a way-finding. “To live is not to garner all you desire,/ to roil in your narrow shell, hard limits/ of the actual.” There are crows, sparrows, hawks, and herons, birds to remind us of how we are all migrating across time, into new existences, new desires and wonder and pain. Treseler is deeply attuned to the erotic, to the ongoing heat and want, to the mouth-on-mouth and press of bodies. How it changes, and does not, over time, the “chance to be momently carried across/ into somewhere, something, someone else.” – The Boston Globe, April 2024
“Against the circumscriptions of suburban malaise, marriage, and the nuclear family, Treseler offers a protectionary “inlet, island, harbor” in poems suffused with sensual, baroque diction and emancipatory desire, “[m]aking / an eros of pitched precision.” In critiquing the “worn / grooves of instinctual life,” Treseler introduces a new feminist ecriture, a blazing “inner spark” of transcendentalist self-reliance.” – The Poetry Foundation, April 2024
AND MORE from LitHub, On the Seawall, Solstice, and Worcester Magazine.
Heather Treseler is also the author of Parturition, which won the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Harvard Review, The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, and PN Review. Her essays appear in Boston Review, Notre Dame Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in eight books about American poetry. Recipient of the W. B. Yeats Prize, Frontier Poetry’s prize, and the Editors’ Prize at The Missouri Review, she is professor of English at Worcester State University and a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. She lives outside of Boston.
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
Lyric, brave, and downright gorgeous, Heather Treseler’s debut collection of poems pierces to the very core. Wielding the fierce music of their finely-wrought truths, these poems shatter the oppressions of silence and invisibility note after note, line after line. The body, the soul, and the story they make together in time unfurl in these poems of longing and living—of survival through and despite our humanness. They will leave you stinging. They will leave you singing. They will leave you seeking within the tableaux of your own heart ‘what craves flight, /crowning sky. Declaring itself, I.’
—Lauren K. Alleyne, author of Honeyfish and professor of English and executive
director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University
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 memorable 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 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. Even her rhymes are slyly woven throughout, in places where one would not expect to find or hear them. She attends to the signs, the auguries and divinations of her title, with the care of an ancient seer and the keen eye of a secular, twenty-first century woman.
—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
