The Trembling Answers

Starred review from February 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.

April 1, 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

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