To Keep Love Blurry

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, selected by Paul Hoover for the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Cradle Book, named a Notable Book of 2010 by the Story Prize committee. His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review and many other publications. He is Director of Digital Operations and Poetry Reviews Editor for Publishers Weekly magazine and served as a Vice President on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2009-2012. His book reviews, features and prose pieces appear widely in many venues, including NPR, Bookforum, Slate, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He was founding editor of the MediaBistro blog eBookNewser and is written extensively about digital publishing. He also teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing courses and NYU and the New School and received his MFA from Columbia University.

• Book One: Life StudiesPart OneThe Prince of RiversFatherMotherConfessionIt Came from the Primordial OozeAction ReactionVariations on the Moment of Apprehending the Extent of One’s ResponsibilityMotherhoodAngerPart TwoOn His Bed and No Longer Among the LivingPart ThreeTo An Editor Who Said I Repeat Myself and Tell Too MuchGet Out“Sometimes We Sleep Well In the Midst of Terrible GriefMy Mom, D. 1994Quatrain Until DawnPart Four: To Keep Love Blurry (Life Studies)I.Goodbye GirlsLate PoemNarcissus and MeSmokingFriendshipOther WomenMasturbationJazzThe Middle GenerationMoney TimeLayoffLines in the RainII.The MeantimeThe Darkness EchoingHomeFameThe Past AheadLike An Answer, YesBook Two: A CelebrationBeginnings for An Essay In Spite of ItselfGrief: A CelebrationNotesAcknowledgements

"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