The Trembling Answers

by Craig Morgan Teicher

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2018 LENORE MARSHALL POETRY PRIZE

At once an extension of and a departure from his previous explorations of family and art, Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers delves boldly into the tangled realms of fatherhood, marriage, and poetry. Dealing with the day-to-day of family life—including the alert anxiety and remarkable beauty of caring for a child with severe cerebral palsy—these personal narratives brightly illuminate the relationship that exists between poetry and a life fiercely lived.

Video Baby Monitor

A watched
pot never boils, so perhaps

a son on a screen never
dies. Like the eyes

of a painting this image
follows wherever we move.

Surveillance is love, love
is every moment the last.

Barely moving picture, memory
of now, sleep, be still, be

safe. Night is long, life short.
I cover you with my eyes.

Craig Morgan Teicher: is the author of four books of poetry and fiction and the editor of Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (2016). A prolific critic and reviewer of poetry, he has worked at Publishers Weekly for 10 years, where he is currently Director of Digital Operations. He teaches at New York Universityand Princeton University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683315
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Series:	American Poets Continuum
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of two previous books of poetry: Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry; and To Keep Love Blurry; as well as Cradle Book: Stories and Fables. He is also the editor of Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz, and his first book of essays about poetry, We Begin in Gladness: On Poetic Development is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2018. He has worked at Publishers Weekly magazine for the last ten years and is currently Director of Digital Operations, where he manages online operations and assets. He also served as PW’s poetry reviews editor for eight years. He is a prolific critic and reviewer of poetry, contributing regularly to The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, NPR, and many other publications. Having previously served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, he has taught at NYU, the Universityof Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton, and elsewhere, and lives in New Jersey with his wife, the poet Brenda Shaughnessy, and their children.

Table of Contents

1

Every Turning 11

Self-Portrait Beside Myself 14

Free 16

Night Nurse 18

Tracheotomy 19

Video Baby Monitor 21

Centering 23

The Hairdryer Cord Is All Tangled 25

Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography 26

2

Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography 31

Nest 33

Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography 34

Apprehension 37

Where Am I? 39

In the Waiting Room 40

3

Book Review: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford 45

4

Self-Portrait as the Man I've Become 51

Letters to Brenda 52

Which Is the Best Part of the Day? 56

Low Note 58

All Elegies 62

Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again 64

Another Day 66

Edgemont 67

Gnostic 75

Another Poem on My Daughter's Birthday 77

Acknowledgments 79

About the Author 81

Colophon 88

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/20/2017
“Every turning toward is a turning away,” writes poet and critic—also PW’s director of digital operations—Teicher (To Keep Love Blurry) to open his fourth collection, an affecting examination of the trade-offs that parenthood, adulthood, and art require. Looser than his previous work but just as perceptive, the book pulses with the acute anxieties of raising a child who has “a body not built// to work.” Its tender, open poems document Teicher’s mortal responsibilities—“I can divide all life/ into breath and waiting/ for the next breath,” he observes in one—and offer a chance to escape them, to muse during the “calm in the troughs/ between.” For example, “Edgemont” takes a long look back on the poet’s suburban childhood (“Nothing’s so poignant now as then,/ and mostly I’m relieved”) while a number of others offer genuine insight on verse as a vocation. Poetry is “never enough,” he writes in one of several poems titled “Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography”: “my lamentation/ did not un-injure my son or/ get me back my job.” 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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Publisher

04/01/2017
Colorado Prize winner Teicher, the poetry editor of the Literary Review, tackles the subjects of parenting, love, and memory in his third collection (after To Keep Love Blurry). The best poems are heartfelt explorations of illness and the strains of caring for a child living with severe cerebral palsy: "I can divide all life/ into breath and waiting/ for the next breath, and/ the calm in the troughs/ between." Time hangs over the work, both the period of his son's and daughter's childhoods and the poet's own upbringing: "Magic ebbs away like time/ ticking into a bucket./ Sometimes it blooms/ momentarily again,/ a sunset or whatever/ draws milk back out/ of the earth." Teicher also ruminates on why he became a poet, how fear influenced him, and whether or not he is an honest writer: "I knew/ I was not safe/ in my head, which was// where I knew my self was." Although many poems resonate with feeling, occasionally the lines fall flat, and mixed metaphors abound. More dissatisfying is Teicher's imprecise language: "Like everywhere else, childhood/ lasted forever, miles and miles/ of time between yearly checkups." VERDICT A mixed effort, though readers will be drawn to the richly described family life and accessible language. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Library Journal