To Keep Love Blurry bookcover

To Keep Love Blurry

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Description

"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 people: 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.


Product Details

PublisherBOA Editions
Publish DateAugust 21, 2012
Pages110
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781934414934
Dimensions8.9 X 5.9 X 0.4 inches | 0.4 pounds

About the Author

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems: Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021); 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 2007 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, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018.

Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and serves as a poetry editor for The Literary Review. He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR. He worked for many years at Publishers Weekly and is now Digital Director of The Paris Review. He is a 2021 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children.

Reviews


"Although the persona in these poems toys with annihilation and (twice) with 'dull blades, ' it survives, and does so through aesthetic will: tight sonnets, a perfect villanelle, a moving prose memoir. 'True self-haters, ' writes the poet in 'Confession, ' 'perform to empty houses, late.' That won't be Teicher's fate."--Publishers Weekly

"Teicher meticulously probes the intersections of writing poetry and living life. He can be lacerating...Teicher's poems also obsessively chart a kind of epistemological and existential anxiety..."--Bookforum

"What can it mean To Keep Love Blurry -- an infinitive phrase suggesting not only value but vigilance. In his second poetry collection, Craig Morgan Teicher demonstrates what is irreconcilable in our commonplace...Obviously, wise elders abound in this collection, but none will quite account for Teicher's vigilant candor in the ways that he vitally enacts the "blurry." Even in a collection that is rich with the past's re-enactment, he admits that the most relevant memories, the most clarifying instances of forgotten dream, are most likely irretrievable, 'locked away somewhere.' Surprisingly, Teicher lets us feel the ways in which such a memory's very irretrievability will offer him something more valuable than clarity..." - On the Seawall

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