Heather Lang-Cassera

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Las Vegas’ Best Poet,
as Voted by Readers of KNPR’s Desert Companion,
Releases Poetry Chapbook with Zeitgeist Press

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Interior and exterior landscapes blur as the girl with the moon-shaped face explores the world that surrounds her. Born into a family who lost their first-born daughter, her mother’s thoughts remain silent above the terra-cotta roof, italicized amongst the bone-white clouds, and her father’s fingers & palms become feathers & wings. They also become blunt. Refracting her emotions through everyday artifacts, the girl’s delicately laced narrative becomes today’s postmodern origin story.

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Advanced Praise

 
“Resonant and elegiac, I was the girl with the moon-shaped face is forged from a fierce attention that is as tender as it is unflinching. Heather Lang Cassera explores the power of relics and how images, like objects, are “harbingers of yesterdays.” What Cassera settles her gaze on is as urgent as what is not seen, and what is not said is as potent as those things that “need to be repeated.” Sensuous and searing, the poems venture beyond loss and brokenness and offer something “made / by fire / difficult to break.” Cassera’s is an urgent, authentic and consoling voice, and I was the girl with the moon-shaped face will linger and haunt.

—Patty Paine, author of Grief & Other Animals

 

“In I was the girl with the moon-shaped face, Heather Lang Cassera writes a disquietude—poems of urgency, under constraint, that roil with gravity, inquiry, and generosity, poems that, themselves, have truly “been captured mid-bloom / or mid-explosion.”

—Renée Ashley, author of The View from the Body