Heather Treseler

"It has been years since I have read a new poet of such rhetorical sophistication and mastery. Wow."-- Frank BidartCruxes in women's lives are the subject of poems in Hard Bargain, including the risks that women take-and the bargains they drive-to achieve autonomy, tosafeguard care and pleasure, and to counter the ordinary misogyny in politics and culture, theworkplace and the world of art. Narrators in this book-from Daphne to Dora, and from Callas toLeda-upend received ideas about the value of women's lives and loves, the nature of theirrights and reckonings.

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.”

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.