Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson

Praise for Craig Morgan Teicher: "Teicher borrows an ember from Frank O'Hara's '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

"One of Teicher's 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

"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

"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

"In these poems, Teicher creates a character, call him Craig Morgan Teicher, who you feel you know and believe."-- Hannah Brooks-Motl, Bookforum

"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 predecessor's self-aware and often selfish use of confession, successfully re-enervating the sense of a real life behind the voice."-- Maya Catherine Popa, The Rumpus

"I recommend Craig Morgan Teicher's new poetry collection, The Trembling Answers, a book of enormous beauty and revelation and hanging questions."-- Natalie Shapiro, Kenyon Review

"Anyone who was fortunate to hear Edson read his poems is not likely to have forgotten the experience. He made his audiences roar with laughter or sit astonished at what they were hearing...the real surprise comes when we realize that despite all the joking we are reading or listening to, these are not the scribblings of a village idiot, but of a comic genius and a serious thinker."-- Charles Simic, from The Foreword"Edson's poems are deranged, oracular, logical, ecstatic, pellucid, desperate, filthy, fathomless, and deceptively simple. When I gave a reading with Edson in 2003 I said, 'Tonight I am reading with one of my greatest heroes.' He's still here with me, always, like a god."-- Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments"Edson permitted himself to have it both ways, to write prose that reverses -- each of his sentences simultaneously urges the reader forward into the action of Edson's stories in miniature and also pulls the reader backward. Musical language, artfully loaded words, subtle twists in the plot, and all sorts of meaningful misdirections in Edson's work demand that we reread, that we never quite finish reading any of these poems, which are ever in the midst of revising themselves."-- Craig Morgan Teicher, from The Afterword