Juniper (2010) by Nancy Takacs

“Takacs’s own rootedness in nature, in the desert landscape where she lives, shines forth throughout this stunning new Limberlost letterpress-printed collection. Her poetry, exploring landscape, memory, and unknown, inner places, always is surprising, sometimes makes us laugh. What Takacs is after, through connection with her desert trees, birds, and plants, is healing—wholeness for herself, for others, and for us.”

— Carol Henrikson

“Add Nancy Takacs’s name to the list of Utah’s best-kept secrets. These are beautifully crafted, well-made poems drawn from deliberately lived, introspective experience . . . Her truths are clothes in the silk of well-drawn imagery and are revealed in a manner that produces a life enhancing afterglow.”

— David Lee

“Takacs’s oeuvre is the conjuring of tradition, celebrating the domesticity of the flower, the sweetness of the fruit, the constancy of home and family . . . . deconstructing personal history only to refigure what remains as a map for rediscovering each moment, each heartbeat . . . . concerned with memory and the ever-widening circle of family artifice, the secrets hidden in ritual and protected by ritual.”

— Erica Vital, Red Rock Review

A former wilderness studies instructor and creative writing professor at the College of Eastern Utah, Nancy Takacs lives in Wellington, Utah, and is the author of Pale Blue Wings (Limberlost Press, 2001), which was a finalist for the Utah Book Award and sold out quickly. She’s also the author of Preserves (City Art Press, 2004) and Wild Animals (Outlaw Artists Press, 2008). She’s the recipient of several awards from the Utah Arts Council, as well as The Nation/Discovery Award. She’s held residencies at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and Vermont Studios. Her work has appeared in Diner, Red Rock Review, Cutthroat, Plainsongs, Adirondack Review, The SpoonRiver Poetry Review, and Weber Studies. She’s done workshops in prisons and schools for the past decade. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa.