“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/

"Blue Universe" in American Crossroads Art Exhibit https://www.flipsnack.com/kathleenroyster/american-crossroads/full-view.html

"Coming Back" and "Garter Snake"

in Canary, reprinted from Clover. 

Spring and  Summer, 2020 http://canarylitmag.org/archive_by_issue.php?issue=48#894

"The Voices " in Kestrel https://www.fairmontstate.edu/kestrel/sites/default/files/issues/contributions/24%20Takacs%20Voices.pdf

15 Bytes

http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/sunday-blog-read-nancy-takacs/

The Worrier, winner of 15 Bytes 2018 BookAward

15 Bytes, Review by Richard Hedderman

http://artistsofutah.org/15bytes/17feb/page2.html

Weber Studies https://www.weber.edu/weberjournal/Journal_Archives/Archive_C2/Vol_19_2/NTakacsPoe.html

"What the Landscape Might Say" 

commemorative poem for the Helper Project's Fine Art Landscape Show https://www.thehelperproject.net/ptta-portfolio/helper-and-the-landscape/

Red Voice, Finishing Line Press, 2016

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/red-voice-by-nancy-takacs/

The Worrier, Juniper Prize for Poetry,

2017, U. of Massachusetts Press, finalist for the National Poetry Series, and 2018 winner of the 15 Bytes Poetry Book Award.

Juniper, hand-lettered press chapbook, Limberlost Press, 2012

http://www.limberlostpress.com/takacs.html

http://sugarhousereviews.blogspot.com/2011/04/juniper-nancy-takacs-limberlost-press.html