Take This Longing by Tresha Faye Haefner

Told in her truly unique voice, Tresha Haefner’s “Take This Longing” is a bold, beautiful, and image-rich collection. Blending the modern with the mythic and natural worlds, these are poems of a life laid bare and brimming, “open/ like a window spilling light/ into a field.” Haefner’s gaze is direct and unflinching as she leads us to the very heart of what matters most: love and our longing for it. This stunning chapbook deserves a permanent place on all poetry nightstands.
–Kelly Cressio-Moeller, Bay Area poet

If seeking a better view, you’ve ever stepped over a rail separating you from a long fall off a high place then you know something about where Haefner lives. Her work is a series of calculated risks. She is sincere without being naive, direct without being blunt, impassioned, but with her tongue still firmly in cheek. She greets us in the familiar territory of longing and loss, but surprises us with sudden laughter, challenging images and turns of phrase that are at once relentless in their honesty and compassionate in their treatment of the listener. Repetition of key figures gives this collection rhythm and cohesion, a sense of moving forward through a maze of familiar yet changing faces–both evolving and devolving. We emerge in a place I can’t describe. Wherever it was, it grabbed me, twisted and wrung me out. This is a good thing. This is all I ever want from poetry.

–David Perez, Author of Love in a Time of Robot Apocalypse from Write Bloody Publishing

I’m enthralled with the poetry of Tresha Faye Haefner,her ability to effortlessly weave the spectacular with the everyday, the celestial with the mortal and erotic. Take This Longing marks the debut of a brave and innovative voice, a sensibility that soars across galaxies of yearning in the space of a single line. Here you have it all: hotel rooms, oceans, tattooes, whales and stars–Haefner’s vision–bone-raw and myth-savvy. Romantic, gritty, and ripe with the ache and ecstasy of physical desire, these poems transcend even as they refuse to release the darkly celebrated body. This is a knockout collection from a poet I deeply admire.

–Michelle Bitting, author of Notes to the Beloved

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]