August, September, October

by Craig Morgan Teicher

August, September, October is a deep, touching meditation on fatherhood, time passing, and survival in a world reshaped by crisis. In two long, diaristic poems and a constellation of lyrical reflections that accrue into a day book of sorts, this collection traces the daily experiences of a poet—someone very much, though not exactly, like Craig Morgan Teicher—through the emotional and existential terrain of caregiving during the COVID-19 lockdown.

In the title poem, “August September October,” the speaker tends to his medically fragile son during a harrowing stretch of illness and hospitalization while pondering the deathbed book of Irish poet Ciaran Carson. The second extended poem, "Midsummer Days,” takes off from Bernadette Mayer’s classic Midwinter Day, following the speaker as he fails to write a memoir and climbs his way back to poetry and toward faith in a world overwhelmed by upheaval. Surrounding these central poems are shorter poems that meditate on grim games, the music of Sonny Rollins, memories of being a young writer, the tyranny of TV screens, and the insane politics of our time. 

August, September, October offers a deeply human snapshot of a family navigating disability, grief, and fleeting hope, all while trying to keep the imagination alive in an age of catastrophe.

134 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 21, 2026

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.