The Trembling Answers

Reviews / Votes

"An affecting examination of the trade-offs that parenthood, adulthood, and art require. This is a modest book, but also a rare, undeceived one. It offers only what it can, which may be all that poetry can hope to: small joys and hard-won wisdom." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Prolific reviewer, Colorado Prize winner, and director of digital operations at Publishers Weekly, Teicher writes affectingly about family relations and the particular burdens and beauties of raising a disabled child. This is poetry, in other words, about how life really feels: 'Night is long, life short. / I cover you with my eyes.'" --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "Craig Morgan Teicher's The Trembling Answers, an 'ultra-vivid / catalog of things / undone, hopes // unfulfilled, opportunities unnoticed so / untaken,' is a portrait not only of the speaker (who is handsome, he claims in one of his many wry unvarnished self-assessments, as long as he avoids the mirror) but of any human being who refuses to delude himself as life's options narrow and love deepens, sharpens, extracts its beautiful dues from us. Humor and fearlessness pulse through these poems. Teicher's so-called 'answers' are complicated by anxiety, excitement, and the drive to know in these poems of resilience, joy, lament, and the existential dread of the 'looming erotic.' Time seems to run backwards even as it moves relentlessly forward. Teicher's speakers are like those figures whose faces are half-smiling, half-crying, mordantly aware of their own beautiful failings and contradictions. Part confession, part manifesto, part x-ray, this is a beautiful mea culpa, an I was here that invites its readers to take up their own unanswerables." --Catherine Barnett "Craig Morgan Teicher's The Trembling Answers is feverish, big, loving, and tender. In this book we find tireless children, tired parents, everyday chores, and wild imagination. This poet is in love with poetry and so we can trust him to deliver. This book is a stunner unlike anything else I have encountered. Read it and weep." --Peter Gizzi