Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, chosen by Paul Hoover for the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Cradle Book, named a notable book by the Story Prize commmittee. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and many other publications. He works at Publishers Weekly and serves as an editor for the Literary Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and children. (Author photo by Sarah Tew)
Inspired by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Craig Morgan Teicher’s To Keep Love Blurry is an exploration of 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, all meditating on the relationship between truth and art. As a son becomes a husband and then a father, Teicher expertly probes a life recast as poetry, with poems that long to leap into the lives of their subjects.
"The book risks most everything poetry can risk: family, reputation, legacy, privacy. The spirits of dead parents mix with a spouse and children and colleagues, and then, there’s Robert Lowell, who presides over this entire volume in a ghostly fashion that should get Harold Bloom’s attention."
—Publishers Weekly
"The majority of poems in this new work from Teicher… employ form in the best sense of the word—as a frame, not a crutch… When at his best, Teicher’s poems are formal and—as a welcome bonus—amusing."
—Library Journal
"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."
—D. A. Powell
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