August, September, October

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