To Keep Love Blurry

by Craig Morgan Teicher

"The brilliance of these poems is how they renovate not only poetry but language, without pretense, without the declaration of war, without summoning the ghost of Shakespeare in any but the most charming ways. I could live in the mind of these poems and never want to leave." --D.A. Powell “With these refreshingly human, formal, playful, and heart-wrenching poems, Teicher not only proves that form may be adapted to fit a contemporary idiom, but that he’s built his own ‘Life Studies’ within the confessional tradition, one which pushes against his predecessors’ self-aware and often selfish use of confession, successfully re-enervating the sense of a real life behind the voice.” -- The Rumpus One of Coldfront 's Top Ten Poetry Books of 2012, To Keep Love Blurry , "open[s] a world of poems that ask obsessive questions of choice and consequence. These are poems of an interior that reimagines the past, pays tribute to predecessors, and above all, values frankness above artifice…The poems are severe in their honesty, which makes them riveting.” -- Coldfront To Keep Love Blurry is about the charged and troubled spaces between intimately connected husbands and wives, parents and children, writers and readers. These poems include sonnets, villanelles, and long poems, as well as two poetic prose pieces, tracing how a son becomes a husband and then a father. Robert Lowell is a constant figure throughout the book, which borrows its four-part structure from that poet's seminal Life Studies .

Craig Morgan Teicher won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He is poetry reviews editor for Publishers Weekly magazine and served as vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2012

About the author

Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, and freelance writer. His first book of poems, Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems, was chosen by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry and is due out this November from the Center for Literary Publishing. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including The Paris Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, Jubilat, Seneca Review, Forklift Ohio, Octopus, La Petit Zine, Verse, and Colorado Review. His reviews of poetry and fiction, and profiles of poets, appear widely in places like Poets & Writers, Poets.org, Time Out New York, Boston Review and Bookforum. He is a contributing editor of Pleiades and works at Publishers Weekly. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and son and plays drums in the band The Fourelles.

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The closing couplet of a sonnet or a Shakespearean scene signals a swift turn and the lingering note of finality that will continue to resonate so dramatically that it literally gives us pause. Teicher takes this familiar pattern as a starting point and varies his reinvention of it so thoroughly as to sound the heavens with its infinite measures. Herein, a long period of grief for which there is no comfort in form. A salacious glance at bodies reined in by exacting rhymes. A liberating push-back against the idea of economy. More play, more improvisation, and more defiantly deadpan humor – this is the vital shot-in-the-arm American poetry needs. And who would have thought it would arrive in such a disarmingly honest voice? The brilliance of these poems is how they renovate not only poetry but language, without pretense, without the declaration of war, without summoning the ghost of Shakespeare in any but the most charming ways. I could live in the mind of these poems and never want to leave. The nice thing is, as a guest at Teicher’s party in poetry’s honor: I get to dally among the roses.

[Steven Tomcavage · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first and last poem in Craig Morgan Teicher's "To Keep Love Blurry" redeem the book and earn it two stars instead of one. The rest of the poems largely consist of what I'd call trite thoughts put to paper seemingly unedited. The majority of the book deals with the death of a mother, a rocky marriage, and a loss of self-definition following a job loss. These could be weighty topics for a poem, if they were deftly handled, but here the poems are very personalized, not at all universal, and come across more as whining than thoughtful reflections. I kept wanting to scream at the author, "Everyone's life is full of struggle and pain, you're not the only one, but what do you do with the pain?" The answer in poem after poem was that the author wallows in self-pity. The first and last poems were the only ones that addressed a larger universe outside the author's ego and made no direct mention of personal struggles, and for that they were a breath of fresh air.

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best poetry collection I have read in a while, it is not to be missed. Teicher meticulously probes the intersections of writing poetry and living life. He can be lacerating, as was Lowell, in his depiction of himself as a father and husband. But Teicher's poems also obsessively chart a kind of epistemological and existential anxiety. Teicher is well aware of the artifice required for such a project; though he is the subject of his poems, his work constantly questions what kind of subject language allows him to be. But bigger ideas stomp through Teicher's book. He seems to be making a bet that Confessional poetry might be uniquely suited to twenty-first-century audiences, obsessed as we are with status updates, Twitter feeds, and a kind of endlessly available, ersatz celebrity.

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like the poet describes himself, these poems are "grumpy, sarcastic, grim." They are also personal (often bordering on embarrassingly private) and emotionally honest (often bordering on whiny over-sharing). Several of these poems struck me because what read like free verse was really, on closer inspection, written in sonnet form—weird; wild seeming, yet utterly formal.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes triple yes to the poems. To the essays: an eh. Ah, but back to those poems: what a surprise! What an excellent and new habitation of form!

And this; I was deeply moved by this: http://www.pw.org/content/enduring_di...

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh... i was blown away by his poem from poem-a-day but the collection was ok... angsty, self reflective, no bombs or shivers

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I put this one down and waited about a month to come back to it. The guy clearly has mommy issues, but there are a few lines here and there that I think will stick with me.