The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present
Poetry At The Library
Andrea Cohen & Heather Treseler
“Connecting Through the Leveling Dark With Origin Myths, Hidden Truths, and Natural Signs”
Sunday, October 20
3:00 PM
Goodwin Forum
Concord Free Public Library, 129 Main St.
Join us for an in-person afternoon with award-winning poets Andrea Cohen and Heather Treseler who will read and engage in a Q & A about their inspirations and craft.
CFA 2024 POETRY PANELISTS
andrea cohen (credit jean wilcox)
Andrea Cohen is the author of eight books of poetry, including, most recently, The Sorrow Apartments (Four Way Books, 2024). Other collections include Everything (Four Way, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way, 2019). Unfathoming (Four Way, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999).
Her poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere.
Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. Over the years, she has taught at The University of Iowa, Emerson College, UMASS-Boston, Boston University, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Merrimack College, where she was the founding director of the Writers’ House. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and taught at Boston University in the spring of 2024.
Andrea Cohen
ABOUT THE SORROW APARTMENTS
The Sorrow Apartments is home to spare and uncanny lyricism–as well as leaping narratives of mystery and loss and wonder. These poems race at once into the past and the possible. And yet, instead of holding things up to the light for a better view, Cohen lifts them to the dark and light, as in “Acapulco,” where an unlikely companion points out, “as men tend to, / the stars comprising Orion’s belt – / as if it were the lustrous sparks and not / the leveling dark that connects us.” For a poet who has been called unfashionable from the get-go, unfashionable never looked so good.
“You keep looking at the poem while it glances at you sidelong, half turning away, half looking back, daring you to try again. In other words, it’s witty. It’s also moving, because it puts in play real stakes: what it means to be a person, what it means to lose a world. The gamesmanship creates the emotional heft.”
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
“Andrea Cohen has been executing a perfect-ten gymnastic vault in her poems for eight books now, and she continues this feat in The Sorrow Apartments with poems to be read and reread and never be tired of… In each poem, long or short, she exhibits the same craft and precision that she’s used before, varying her tone between heartbreaking and humorous, the words of each line a whiplash against what follows, often pitted against the speed of technology, text, and error in the world of the 21st century. ”
“If Andrea Cohen’s poems sometimes feel like they are whispering in your ear long after you have read them, it’s because these aren’t just poems. Cohen has found a way to make spells out of glimpses of the world. But these are poems that don’t take themselves too seriously, but rather, in a playful manner, reveal the world via half-breaths, with rhymes that spark or ring in the ear-becoming a tune to follow, a tune to live by. ”
“The poems in Everything are so short and sharply formed, and so individually memorable, that one is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is a work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul. ”
heather treseler
Heather Treseler is the 2023 winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her debut poetry collection, Auguries & Divinations (Bauhan, 2024). Her book Parturition (Southword, 2020) received the 2019 chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club.
Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Irish Times, JAMA, and The Iowa Review, among other journals. Her memoir essay "My Search for Elizabeth Bishop" was included in the list of Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. Also 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 Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center, the Boston Athenaeum, and the T. S. Eliot House. Recipient of the George I. Alden award for Excellence in Teaching, she is professor of English at Worcester State University.
Heather Treseler
ABOUT AUGERIES & DIVINATIONS
Winner of the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
Auguries & Divinations tracks a young woman’s coming of age, attuned to the unspoken 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 the classical practice of augury, or observing birds to discern human fate.
“A molten heat flames at the center of Heather Treseler’s new poetry collection. She writes of what it is to emerge into a world, and then try to escape it for another one, and the violence and release involved with the efforts. ….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. ”
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
“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 remarkable immediacy and power. This is a beautifully poised, authoritative debut. - Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art and the Niel Gray Jr., ”
“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. ”
“Poets we meet in Treseler’s poems include Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, and there are references going back to the Roman poet Catullus and beyond. Treseler’s poetry can begin with an observation or thought that expands into a wider panorama of deep thinking and feeling. “Shorelines” moves from the sound of the waves at Ogunquit, Maine, to a deeply personal experience and reflection of the narrator’s visit there. ”