NANCY TAKACS

Nancy's awards, bio, and publications

Nancy Takacs lives and works in Utah. Her newest book is A Whispering Beetle, published by Broadstone Books, November 2026, and is available on their website.

Her poems appear in The Baltimore Review, Cider Press Review, About Place, On the Seawall, Exit 13, Sugar House Review, Nomad, Sundress Best Dressed, The Harvard Review, Missouri Review, The Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, Crab Creek Review, terrain.org., 2River, Kestrel, Hayden's Ferry Review, Nimrod, Weber, Verse Daily, and many other literary journals. Her other books include Dearest Water, The Worrier: poems, Blue Patina, Red Voice, Juniper, Preserves, Wild Animals, and Pale Blue Wings. She is the recipient of awards, including The Juniper Prize, Finalist for the National Poetry Series, runner-up for The Missouri Review Editor's Prize; a Pushcart Prize, The Sherwin Howard Poetry Prize, the 2018 15 Bytes Poetry Prize, the 2016 15 Bytes Poetry Prize, The Nation/Discovery Award, and the book-length Poetry Award from the Utah Arts and Museum's originial writing contest. Nancy has also been an artist-in-the schools, as well as in prisons. An MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she is an emerita professor at Utah State University Eastern, and a former wilderness studies instructor. She currently teaches poetry writing privately, as well as for communities of writers. In Carbon County, she has leads a free poetry workshop at the CC Senior Center. Nancy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Helper City, Utah,

and is the originator of The Steamboat Mountain Reading Series in Helper. Please contact her if you would like to schedule a reading or a workshop with her, for your community.

Reviews of Dearest Water

“Not enough are we guttural, or loving,” we read here and feel the truth of it in our animal bodies. In Dearest Water, Nancy Takacs explores a wide range of relationships, from the “pickles” and “mazes” of the human family to the “shine of scorpions” and “terrible miracle” of a bear’s snout. These marvelous ecopoems help us feel more deeply and sensuously rooted even as they send us into the stars and more numinous questions of our kind. “I like the word amethyst in my mouth,” writes Takacs in a rich music that would conjure the wonder—in every moment, in each of us—of being part of the living earth. — Derek Sheffield, Poetry Editor of Terrain.org and author of Not for Luck

To read Dearest Water is to fall in love with leisure, to linger with the intimacy of sensuous description, with the flavors and colors of flowers, foods, fabrics, gardens, woods, and women. It’s easy to fall in love with Takacs’ writing, with the sounds of her lines, her slant rhymes, her halo/bungalow/bramble, her tentacle/coral/whorl, her tremble/sienna/fickle, her circus of cirrus. Easy to love the disparate objects and thoughts inhabiting the stanzas, living in bliss alongside each other, every fresh look a tingling surprise, little shocks pulsing up. And the endings are never what you think, always a new way to see, feel, and imagine, enhanced by an image that carries light, weight, music, escape, humor, insight. --Star Coulbrooke, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah

“I am thirsty/ for the lost,” writes Nancy Takacs in the title poem of Dearest Water. The poems in this collection summon back and transform their lost ones, from the bluebells and silks of memory, to a mother’s garden and ghost aunts, to the bodies and voices of earlier selves. They are thirsty, too, for wildness: the hunger of the bear, the poet’s desire for “the blue hip/ of a mountain,” the way God is “snout and tentacle,/ a brazen hornet.” Through meditative verve and layers of acute lyric imagery, Takacs calls out to canyons and starlight, seeds and stones, with a stirring clarity of vision. Like the speaker who rakes sorrel and thistle to make room for the poppies, these poems clear the way for the most feral of blooms, “their centers dark/ and alive as bees.” Sally Rosen Kindred, author of Where the Wolf

Other links to her work:

https://sundressblog.com/2023/09/29/the-wardrobes-best-dressed-dearest-water-by-nancy-takacs-5/

http://www.deanrader.com/savage.html

Mapping Literary Utah

https://mappingliteraryutah.org/utah-writers/nancy-takacs

Blue Patina, Blue Begonia Press,

winner of 2016 "15 Bytes" Book Award

Reviewed by Danielle Dubrasky

http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/rituals-and-routines-nancy-takacs-blue-patina/

"The Worrier red-winged blackbirds" in terrain

https://www.terrain.org/2015/poetry/two-poems-by-nancy-takacs/

"Coming Back" and "Garter Snake"