What Monsters You Make of Them

Christian Teresi is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work has been published in many journals, including AGNI, the American Poetry Review, Blackbird, the Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, Literary Hub, Narrative, and Subtropics. What Monsters You Make of Them is his first collection. His work has been supported by a fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He holds degrees from Binghamton University and George Mason University. Born in Albany, New York, he currently lives in Washington, DC, where he works on international education and public diplomacy initiatives.

“Echoing out from etymology, ‘the place where they plant the unwanted,’ reveling in the pastiche surreality of US cultural and political history, ‘where each side of time lives in the other’s deepest past,’ Christian Teresi’s exquisite poems are that rare work wrought from deep necessity and sung from an even deeper compassion. Each line captures the ache of desire, the delicate dance of hope, each poem lingering long after reading, haunting ‘as murmurs no longer fluent in their origin.’ Deft in form, this is a dazzling collection, reminding us we are all ‘where the landscape nurtures the in-between,’ and there, in yearning and grace, ‘the end has never been the end.’” —J. Michael Martinez, author of Tarta Americana and Museum of the Americas, which was long-listed for the National Book Award“Here, Teresi inhabits people, as well as the spaces between them, to reveal the self as a web of interconnections. The dialogue between famous authors, Mayan gods, mythic figures, and celebrities accumulates into both a communal self as well as a highly personal one—a mind whose edges are defined by what is questioned and considered. When he says, in ‘Metamorphoses,’ ‘After enough time, no one remembers who anyone was,’ it is actually a celebration of this communal, human interaction.” —Richard Siken, author of I Do Know Some Things, War of the Foxes, and Crush, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award"A cogent, skeptical collection that examines those whose stories are erased or preserved."—Kirkus Reviews