Review In Red Voice, Nancy Takacs explores a voice of adventure and wisdom, of finding a way, through rough music and appetite. Her Echo's breath is stopped by "the wrists of water lilies" and the necessity of the desert landscape that Takacs has lived in and loved for so many years, to reach a place where a lover must promise that "he will not speak until / it improves on silence." Donna J. Long, poet, and editor of Kestrel and Isle of Flowers Nancy Takacs brings Echo back to life in the poems of Red Voice. With lush, sumptuous, sensual, down to earth imagery, she re-envisions Echo's myth-re-imagines how voice, life, self, can be re-sought, re-gained, and brought into alignment, oneness, with Nature, even in the context of this damaged world. From the start, we are drawn in, entangled, enchanted. Here, as throughout the body of her work, Nancy Takacs has a way of making language seem to spill onto the page: her soul, it seems, writes through her. Carol Henrikson, author of The Well and Knowing Nothing about Gypsies Nancy Takacs creates a current of language that carries us through an intense collage of wilderness, praising its bits and pieces-ocotillo, geode, hemlock, abalone, crushed trillium, the bear. In these poems the voice of Echo thaws, unleashing a deluge of imagistic power. Like the bear coming out of hibernation and shaking off its winter muteness, these poems awaken in all of us the mystery and wilderness of language, as Takacs rediscovers the voice of Echo and allows her to speak from bicker and blaze, shutter and whorl, hurricane and whitewater. Kate Kingston, author of History of Grey and Shaking the Kaleidoscope About the Author Nancy Takacs is the the winner of the 2016 Juniper Prize for her book The Worrier. Her book Blue Patina won the 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry. Other books include Pale Blue Wings, Preserves, Juniper, and Wild Animals. A former wilderness studies and creative writing professor at the College of Eastern Utah, she is the recipient of the Sherwin W. Howard Poetry Award from Weber: The Contemporary West, several writing awards from the Utah Arts Council, and the Nation/Discovery Award. She lives with her husband Jan Minich, in Wellington, Utah.