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American Poets Continuum
by Craig Morgan Teicher
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.
"Starred Review. 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." - 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." - D.A. Powell
This information about To Keep Love Blurry was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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