The Trembling Answers

“Every turning toward is a turning away,” writes poet and critic—also PW’s director of digital operations—Teicher (To Keep Love Blurry) to open his fourth collection, an affecting examination of the trade-offs that parenthood, adulthood, and art require. Looser than his previous work but just as perceptive, the book pulses with the acute anxieties of raising a child who has “a body not built// to work.” Its tender, open poems document Teicher’s mortal responsibilities—“I can divide all life/ into breath and waiting/ for the next breath,” he observes in one—and offer a chance to escape them, to muse during the “calm in the troughs/ between.” For example, “Edgemont” takes a long look back on the poet’s suburban childhood (“Nothing’s so poignant now as then,/ and mostly I’m relieved”) while a number of others offer genuine insight on verse as a vocation. Poetry is “never enough,” he writes in one of several poems titled “Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography”: “my lamentation/ did not un-injure my son or/ get me back my job.” 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. (Apr.)