Praise for Frozen Latitudes

The wrenching attempt to comprehend a father's dementia fires Therése Halscheid's Frozen Latitudes. Past starvation, past an encounter with a demanding landscape, the poet emerges tougher, wiser, her compassion intact. “But give me your words,” she writes, “that I might wear / what is unspoken outward / into the world.” This wondrous book does just that, with light, exactitude, and a respect for raw mystery.

— Paul Lisicky, author of Unbuilt Projects

“My lips, bright as scars, are parting / open with words,” writes Therése Halscheid. In these moving poems of loss, interwoven with vivid poems inspired by people and the landscape of Alaska, she composes resonant lines imbued with deep emotion.

— Arthur Sze, author of Compass Rose

In Frozen Latitudes, Therése Halscheid welcomes the lucky reader into a world of deep love, familial illness, and the dual human urges to speak and be heard. The narrator takes a look at “how it really looked long ago” and how “lips, bright as scars, are parting open with words so the great air can take them.” The settings of these exquisite poems range from a childhood home colored by a father’s dementia to the northern interior of Alaska with its stories from The Real People in which each word is “a language of light.” These are moving, masterful poems in a brilliantly cohesive collection.

— Donna Baier Stein, editor of Tiferet

About the Author

Therése Halscheid’s previous poetry collections include Powertalk, Without Home, Uncommon Geography—which won a finalist award for the Paterson Poetry Book Prize—and Greatest Hits, a chapbook award from Pudding House Publications.

She received her MA from Rowan and MFA from Rutgers University, and currently teaches for Atlantic Cape Community College, NJ. Through cultural exchange programs she has traveled widely, and taught in England and Russia. Through the Alaskan Arts Council, she had the privilege of working with an Inupiaq Eskimo tribe on White Mountain, as well as a residency in Homer.

For the past two decades, she has been house-sitting—caring for others’ homes and animals—while writing. This mobility, along with simple living, has helped her to sustain her writing life. Her photography chronicles her journey, and has been in juried shows. 

In this new book of poems, Frozen Latitudes, she focuses on her father Charles, who survived for thirty years after his brain was severely damaged during heart surgery. He remained at home for most of that time under the care of the author and her mother. Woven among these pages are journey poems of Alaska and other locales, which share the interchangeability of nature and human nature.