Description
Book Synopsis"The brilliance of these poems is how they renovate not only poetry but language, without pretense, without the declaration of war, without summoning the ghost of Shakespeare in any but the most charming ways. I could live in the mind of these poems and never want to leave." --D.A. Powell "With these refreshingly human, formal, playful, and heart-wrenching poems, Teicher not only proves that form may be adapted to fit a contemporary idiom, but that he's built his own 'Life Studies' within the confessional tradition, one which pushes against his predecessors' self-aware and often selfish use of confession, successfully re-enervating the sense of a real life behind the voice." --The Rumpus One of Coldfront's Top Ten Poetry Books of 2012, To Keep Love Blurry, "open[s] a world of poems that ask obsessive questions of choice and consequence. These are poems of an interior that reimagines the past, pays tribute to predecessors, and above all, values frankness above artifice...The poems are severe in their honesty, which makes them riveting." --Coldfront To Keep Love Blurry is about the charged and troubled spaces between intimately connected people: husbands and wives, parents and children, writers and readers. These poems include sonnets, villanelles, and long poems, as well as two poetic prose pieces, tracing how a son becomes a husband and then a father. Robert Lowell is a constant figure throughout the book, which borrows its four-part structure from that poet's seminal Life Studies. Craig Morgan Teicher won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He is poetry reviews editor for Publishers Weekly magazine and served as vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
Trade Review"Although the persona in these poems toys with annihilation and (twice) with 'dull blades,' it survives, and does so through aesthetic will: tight sonnets, a perfect villanelle, a moving prose memoir. 'True self-haters,' writes the poet in 'Confession,' 'perform to empty houses, late.' That won't be Teicher's fate."--Publishers Weekly "Teicher meticulously probes the intersections of writing poetry and living life. He can be lacerating...Teicher's poems also obsessively chart a kind of epistemological and existential anxiety..."--Bookforum "What can it mean To Keep Love Blurry -- an infinitive phrase suggesting not only value but vigilance. In his second poetry collection, Craig Morgan Teicher demonstrates what is irreconcilable in our commonplace...Obviously, wise elders abound in this collection, but none will quite account for Teicher's vigilant candor in the ways that he vitally enacts the "blurry." Even in a collection that is rich with the past's re-enactment, he admits that the most relevant memories, the most clarifying instances of forgotten dream, are most likely irretrievable, 'locked away somewhere.' Surprisingly, Teicher lets us feel the ways in which such a memory's very irretrievability will offer him something more valuable than clarity..." - On the Seawall
Table of ContentsBook One: Life Studies Part One The Prince of Rivers Father Mother Confession It Came from the Primordial Ooze Action Reaction Variations on the Moment of Apprehending the Extent of One’s Responsibility Motherhood Anger Part Two On His Bed and No Longer Among the Living Part Three To An Editor Who Said I Repeat Myself and Tell Too Much Get Out “Sometimes We Sleep Well In the Midst of Terrible Grief My Mom, D. 1994 Quatrain Until Dawn Part Four: To Keep Love Blurry (Life Studies) I. Goodbye Girls Late Poem Narcissus and Me Smoking Friendship Other Women Masturbation Jazz The Middle Generation Money Time Layoff Lines in the Rain II. The Meantime The Darkness Echoing Home Fame The Past Ahead Like An Answer, Yes Book Two: A Celebration Beginnings for An Essay In Spite of Itself Grief: A Celebration Notes Acknowledgements
