Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey

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Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winning poet and nationally recognized literary critic Craig Morgan Teichers Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey is a poetry collection about entering middle age, raising a young family, sustaining a marriage, and taking care of a severely disabled child. Built around two sequences of sonnets, and interrupted by two sets of lyric poems, a set of prose poems, and a long poem about death, the book narrates a familys move to the suburbs and their coming to terms with the ghosts of the past and with hard-to-hold hopes for the future.

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Praise for Craig Morgan Teicher

Teicher borrows an ember from Frank OHaras I do this I do that poetry to light his family hearth, wielding the urbane form in the service of suburban existentialism in these affecting lines.
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"An understated, subtle dissertation on contemporary middle-class life in verse, and a fine introduction to a rising poet."
Library Journal, Starred Review

From a state of bewilderment to the condition of omniscience, Craig Morgan Teichers poetry stands simultaneously inside and outside of common understanding, struggling to un-domesticate the mind even as it seeks to more deeply inhabit the intimacies of domestic life. This is a book of unflinching self-scrutiny, by turns meditative, plainspoken, funny, and profound, where answers are not stable solutions but achingly alert responses to the trauma and triumph of human existence.
2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize Judges Citation

One of Teichers great strengths is his honesty. He frequently reveals his flaws and mistakes to the reader, laying bare intimate details about his wife, his son, and his marriage to illustrate his humanity. His writing is full of lists and repetition, as if Teicher is searching for answers in real-time. Each poem is meaty and sprawling, providing plenty of space for interpretation and re-interpretation.
Literary Hub

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

Author Bio

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three previous books of poems: The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His first collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, was published by Graywolf in November 2018.