
August, September, October
Craig Morgan Teicher(Author)
BOA Editions, Limited (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 4. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
134 pages
978-1-968507-00-8 (ISBN)
Description
August, September, October is a deep, vulnerable meditation on fatherhood, time passing, and survival in a world reshaped by crisis. In two long, diaristic poems and a constellation of lyrical reflections that accrue into a day book of sorts, this collection traces the daily experiences of a poet-someone very much, though not exactly, like Craig Morgan Teicher-through the emotional and existential terrain of caregiving during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In the title poem, "August September October," the speaker tends to his medically fragile son during a harrowing stretch of illness and hospitalization while pondering the deathbed book of Irish poet Ciaran Carson. The second extended poem, "Midsummer Days," takes off from Bernadette Mayer's classic Midwinter Day, following the speaker as he fails to write a memoir and climbs his way back to poetry and toward faith in a world overwhelmed by upheaval. Surrounding these central poems are shorter poems that meditate on grim games, the music of Sonny Rollins, memories of being a young writer, the tyranny of TV screens, and the insane politics of our time.
August, September, October offers a profoundly human snapshot of a family navigating disability, grief, and fleeting hope, all while trying to keep the imagination alive in an age of catastrophe.
In the title poem, "August September October," the speaker tends to his medically fragile son during a harrowing stretch of illness and hospitalization while pondering the deathbed book of Irish poet Ciaran Carson. The second extended poem, "Midsummer Days," takes off from Bernadette Mayer's classic Midwinter Day, following the speaker as he fails to write a memoir and climbs his way back to poetry and toward faith in a world overwhelmed by upheaval. Surrounding these central poems are shorter poems that meditate on grim games, the music of Sonny Rollins, memories of being a young writer, the tyranny of TV screens, and the insane politics of our time.
August, September, October offers a profoundly human snapshot of a family navigating disability, grief, and fleeting hope, all while trying to keep the imagination alive in an age of catastrophe.
Reviews / Votes
"This gutsy book blazes with the glory of a father's love for his son. It tells the story of Craig, Brenda, Cal, Simone, and Cashew, the dog. Written amidst night feeds, trips to the hospital, antibiotics, and the coil of everyday life, it seems proof that poetry cannot be stamped out. In this raw, gem-like, reliquary of a book, Teicher has transmuted anger, grief, and loss into a most durable celebration of love." -Henri Cole, author of The Other Love"Craig Morgan Teicher has picked the bones out of what once was a memoir and used its bones to build a tower so delicate and high and magnificent, the only name beautiful and impossible enough to give this tower is POEM. I climbed up to the very top, and I may never come down. The view from up here is unlike anything you've ever seen." -Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
"Craig Morgan Teicher makes poetry the way William Carlos Williams did, out of his life, his love, and his love of literature, yes. Aware of how the intense now has already turned into the abstracted then. This work occurs in the now and then, is filled with details of his family suffering, of the world aflame, but the terror is in a distance that knows it's already happened-even a time scheme of three months implies a blurring, the most frightening event, eventuality, is a past, no matter the grammar. And yet these poems feels so present, so...emerging. And the terror is part of the beautiful, when it happens. And even 'the hissing leaves have a part to play.'" -Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth
"Beauty and the dark undertow of suffering are skillfully woven throughout the diaristic and companionable latest from Teicher (Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey). The opening poems set up the collection's preoccupation with constriction, imagining a dog on a leash in the garden for whom 'territory,/ which was the whole wide yard, is diminishing.' Elsewhere, Teicher nods toward the depth of pain that underlies the seemingly light, approachable surface of the speaker's voice: 'you have to/ laugh at yourself and put/ your pain in context.' The simplest domestic pleasures are ennobled and sought out: 'I just want to sit/ on a comfy chair with a quiet/ mind and read an interesting/ book.' Teicher speaks directly to the easeful tone that makes the work so palatable ('Is this really all I have to do/ and it's poetry?') before pulling a sleight of hand and leaving the reader under no illusion as to the weight of his conversational reflections: "I want a longish line because I am desperate to talk'; 'No one/ I love is my dead/ mother.' This is a monumental reckoning with life's enduring questions."-Publishers Weekly
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Rochester
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 149 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
210 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-968507-00-8 (9781968507008)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of five books of poems: August, September, October (BOA, 2026); Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry and more. He lives in West Orange, New Jersey.