The Trembling Answers

(Paperback)

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At once an extension of and a departure from his previous explorations of family and art, Craig Morgan Teichers The Trembling Answers delves boldly into the tangled realms of fatherhood, marriage, and poetry. Dealing with the day-to-day of family lifeincluding the alert anxiety and remarkable beauty of caring for a child with severe cerebral palsythese 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 University and Princeton University.

Reviews

"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

Author Bio

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 University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Princeton, and elsewhere, and lives in New Jersey with his wife, the poet Brenda Shaughnessy, and their children.