Full 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.
Contents
Book One: Life Studies
Part One
The Prince of Rivers
Father
Mother
Confession
It Came from the Primordial Ooze
Action Reaction
Variations on the Moment of Apprehending the Extent of One's Responsibility
Motherhood
Anger
Part Two
On His Bed and No Longer Among the Living
Part Three
To An Editor Who Said I Repeat Myself and Tell Too Much
Get Out
"Sometimes We Sleep Well In the Midst of Terrible Grief
My Mom, D. 1994
Quatrain Until Dawn
Part Four: To Keep Love Blurry (Life Studies)
I.
Goodbye Girls
Late Poem
Narcissus and Me
Smoking
Friendship
Other Women
Masturbation
Jazz
The Middle Generation
Money Time
Layoff
Lines in the Rain
II.
The Meantime
The Darkness Echoing
Home
Fame
The Past Ahead
Like An Answer, Yes
Book Two: A Celebration
Beginnings for An Essay In Spite of Itself
Grief: A Celebration
Notes
Acknowledgements
