Heather Treseler

Apr 8, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Heather Treseler |Virginia Konchan

Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations is based in the practice of augury—symbols of entrapment and escape abound, interspersed with iconic avian poems, such as “Sparrow,” “Heron,” “Hawk,” “Haruspication,” and “Feathered Thing.” “Is it vestigial,” the poet asks, in deft mappings of migration, “this need to tally birds and bells, catalogue / the signs?” Treseler delights in imaginative recasting: of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, and Gertrude Stein; of the personae of Anne...

Feb 6, 2024 | jamanetwork.com | Heather Treseler

A dark-haired girl in a bed across from minehad inhaled a chunk of apple—lodging it likea runaway kite in the papery tree of her lung. Then it was fished out, in surgery, with a thintube, like the red magnet my father loweredon a string—after the baby, jowled and madas Potemkin, hurled the house keys downthe grate, thrilling to their metal music,their jangled fall, their echo of heavy doors,strained tones, the adult voice of fate. I could not speak to her under her plastictent.