Alexandra Teague

Published in 2017, this book pre-dates half a dozen more incidents of gun violence on a mass scale across the country that underline its importance. This is a collection of new or relevant poems that cover all facets of gun violence from the perpetrator to the victim to those left behind to mourn or try to make sense of the tragedy. Each poem has a personal reflective response from someone whose life has been impacted by gun violence, "a call-and-response format, a church of the possible."It show more is an impressive collection of literature, but also dedicated people who want to see a better side of America and ensure safety of all its citizens. Though it leans left due to the sheer number of tragedies, there is representation of gun rights advocates and more importantly the call for common ground. How do we balance our freedom from the 2nd Amendment with responsible citizenship? No easy answers, but an important dialogue and a profound inquiry that shows the power of words and experience. "What poetry can do is untangle some of the 'facts' and reveal the human tissue underneath." says Colum McCann in his forward. show less

As an old sociology major I'm appreciative of the poem The Sociologist Dreams: "Their bodies float in the water./ She reaches to save them, but their hands turn to pages of numbers:// 35% of unmarried mothers sink below the line/ of poverty; 90% sink below the sea." Teague's poems spring from various interesting sources: a World War 2 photograph from the Philippines, an Edward Hopper painting, a Dungeons and Dragons manual, the experience of teaching English to immigrants, Glenn Gould, Frida show more and Diego, Choose Your Own Adventure books, Pliny the Elder's creepy thoughts on a Caesarean birth fatal to the mother being a good omen for the child ("To be born from a corpse, cut darkly toward breath,/ like spirit unsewn from the cloth of death/ was fortunate.").

One word that really comes to mind about these poems is "precise". They are very precise. Smartly constructed. I did feel that for me the emotional content, that power of a poem to really affect the reader, tailed off towards the latter half of the collection, but the first section, Dead Reckoning, is fairly brilliant. show less

In poems about teaching English to immigrant students, Alexandra Teague beautifully explores the intersection between language and experience. In my favorite poem from her debut collection, "English Fundamentals," Teague observes a student diagramming sentences with colored markers. She writes: "She has given me/grammar as a stained glass window..." Where another poet might compose an ars poetica, Teague creates an ars grammatica, seeing significance of grammar as a means of fashioning show more meaning and beauty out of one's experience.

She also writes about relationships, about art (Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo and Edward Hopper all inspire her poetry), and about the human body. What she knows, and what her poetry skillfully conveys, is that there is more than one way of looking at anything—even a poem. One poem is titled "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Poem"—but every poem seems to offer alternate paths to meaning. In "Two Drafts Written After a Fight," for instance, the poet shows how the placement of punctuation, a slight change of emphasis but not of wording, can change the meaning of a poem entirely. show less

The way Teague uses repetition in several poems in this book is so very, very satisfying. I also particularly loved the poems on works of art (always a sucker for those), about living in Missouri/the Midwest and the Bay area/on the coast, and of teaching ESL (another always on that one).