Hard Bargain
Poetry by Heather Treseler
$12.00
Praise for Heather Treseler’s Work
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. … Like Elizabeth Bishop, like Frank Bidart, Treseler makes a mode of scrupulous attention its own kind of passion.
– Maureen N. McLane
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
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. – Langdon Hammer
Nervosa
You began eating again not on account
of the long nights of fevered half-sleep
or the fine hair mossing your arms
or the cold that shadowed you like
an ice moon of Pluto. You estranged
yourself from nature with calm
indifference, letting breasts retreat
to apostrophes on torso’s sentence
that summer of undesire. Away
from home’s old moorings, you
felt like a suitcase gone rogue—
sprung loose on a hot tarmac
or frenzied freeway, girlhood’s
embarrassments flapping freely
in the wind. Noontimes, you sat
at the Fill-a-Buster Café, drunk
on the smell of melting sandwiches,
numb to winks and nods, on break
from a summer job filing bills
honed into law, cool type of
governances. But on that day
you could not remember what
you had read in the newspaper,
natural disasters muddled with
wars, celluloid scenes of ruin.
Words swam unfixed from
meaning, and you knew then
what would happen if you did
not pay rent on your tenanted
body, if you did not go blinking
into the day’s wincing brightness,
leaving off glassed interiors
and closets of compliance
for the muddy errands of hunger,
the aching notes of a singer,
flesh flowered on her bones.
About the Author
HEATHER TRESELER is the author of Auguries & Divinations (Bauhan, 2024), which received the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and the 2024 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Award, and Parturition (Southword, 2020), which received the 2019 chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Cincinnati Review, PN Review, The Irish Times, JAMA, Narrative, The Missouri Review, and The Iowa Review, among other journals.
Treseler’s essays appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, PN Review, and in eight books about contemporary poetry. Her essay “My Search for Elizabeth Bishop” was cited in Best American Essays. In 2022, she edited Beyond the Frame, Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts, a collection of essays by distinguished New England writers, highlighting signature artworks at the Worcester Art Museum.
Her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as residencies at the Boston Athenaeum, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the T. S. Eliot House. Recipient of the George I. Alden award for Excellence in Teaching, she is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and professor of English at Worcester State University. She teaches courses in creative writing (poetry and non-fiction), contemporary American literature, and literature and medicine.