Craig Morgan Teicher

Ultimately, it was too much. Teicher gives us a life, in all its messy, glorious insecurity, in the guise of formal verse. I needed two months to get from poem one to poem two. Getting to Death, the concluding piece, might take more time than I have, as each cuts away a slice of protective myth about contemporary society (or self) that must then scab over and heal before moving along to the next. Much like life itself.

In this very personal and moving collection, Craig Morgan Teicher explores his own biography. We feel his worry and pain as a father of a health young girl and a very sick boy. We listen to his love for his wife, his children, for the mother he lost when he was young, for the housekeeper who raised him, for the father who loved only through his emotional distance.

Some of the lines are very fine, such as:

...She lived and she grows
like joy spreading from the syllables
of songs.

Or

I could hold show more that rock
and rewind time and find myself
standing between verb tenses.

Or

I can divide all life
into breath and waiting
for the next breath, and
the calm in the troughs
between.

Some of the poems are complete, and touching, and real. You read the collection and imagine you are listening to a friend, pretending you know them, as much as any human can know another. A worthwhile read. show less

The first and last poem in Craig Morgan Teicher's "To Keep Love Blurry" redeem the book and earn it two stars instead of one. The rest of the poems largely consist of what I'd call trite thoughts put to paper seemingly unedited. The majority of the book deals with the death of a mother, a rocky marriage, and a loss of self-definition following a job loss. These could be weighty topics for a poem, if they were deftly handled, but here the poems are very personalized, not at all universal, and show more come across more as whining than thoughtful reflections. I kept wanting to scream at the author, "Everyone's life is full of struggle and pain, you're not the only one, but what do you do with the pain?" The answer in poem after poem was that the author wallows in self-pity. The first and last poems were the only ones that addressed a larger universe outside the author's ego and made no direct mention of personal struggles, and for that they were a breath of fresh air. show less

I am really enjoying this, even more since having a baby myself. He has some really grounded imagery and yet also the sublime of the banal.