Heather Treseler's Parturition Practices a Rooted Precision

For the new, September issue of The Critical Flame, Ayaz Muratoglu reviews New England poet Heather Treseler's chapbook, Parturition (Southword Editions, 2020), comparing the work to Anne Carson's The Glass Essay. "If Carson writes of desire as a series of edges, Treseler pushes this analysis toward the essential elements," writes Muratoglu, "the edges of water, the edges of ice, the edges of air, practicing a rooted precision." More:

…Her close attention to formal detail, down to the length of each line and stanza, evokes Elizabeth Bishop, a poet of whom Treseler is both a student and scholar. Formal structures allow Treseler’s narrators to take surprising leaps, to counterbalance discursive thought with haiku-like reflection. Her poetic impulses, rooted in tradition but radical in vision, recall an early Adrienne Rich or, to draw from Frank Bidart’s observation, an early Robert Lowell.

The poem “Voyeur” describes a summer swim at Walden Pond: “Three women, two nude, thawing from / a New England winter so fierce it broke / records, pipes, roof rakes, vertebrae, // grim cheer in local habits of hibernation.” Here, water freezes and thaws, breaking down the edges of self, of female self. In the antipodes of New England seasons, winter and summer, water is an agent of destruction but also of recrudescence and self-discovery.

Read on at The Critical Flame.