Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey

By Craig Morgan Teicher

Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winning poet and nationally recognized literary critic Craig Morgan Teicher’s Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey is a poetry collection about entering middle age, raising a young family, sustaining a marriage, and taking care of a severely disabled child. Built around two sequences of sonnets, and interrupted by two sets of lyric poems, a set of prose poems, and a long poem about death, the book narrates a family’s move to the suburbs and their coming to terms with the ghosts of the past and with hard-to-hold hopes for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950774265

Craig Morgan Teicher

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.

Book preview

I AM A FATHER NOW

I am a father now, an unprecedented thing

I never was before and have always been,

preparing, preparing since I was born a father’s son,

and not a mother’s daughter. Plus I married a daughter’s

mother, little did I know. But how could I?

It had only been a moment since I arrived—

I was barely conceived on one of time’s

unremembered nights, and suddenly I woke

with a child crying in each ear, these years

like the coils of a patient snake that has lovingly

nibbled and swallowed me countlessly.

I am diminished to a great height, the ceiling

of the world tickling the tips of my lost hairs.

I loom like the moon over two baby baboons,

my helpless, hopeful hobbits, one for each

leaden eye. I might be just like my father’s

father for all I know. I could be the bearer

of my mother’s father’s nose, and look

what I’ve done with it, seat of my driving glasses.

I’m the lover, quietly, furtively, of the bearer

of my daughter and son—the fever of our sex

shakes the house we uphold, but let’s not wake

the children here or next door or next door to that.

Or let’s wake them up and play with them now

while no one’s looking, for joy is always

our secret, the secret of this hurried, harried life

without horses. I sleep when I can, and I can’t die.

I have never been as mortal as now. I bend low,

my back aching and breaking under grateful weight.

No matter—I’ll grow another. I have my children

to thank for my bending body, which is born

a hundred times each day, dying every breath.

ASSURANCES 1

When the time comes, it will be the first time.

~

A life, even a long one, is really very short. Even the littlest book, a page, a paragraph, a word, takes many lives to write.

~

Almost there … and then? I start again, but not, of course, from the beginning.

~

Word problem: I am now as old as my parents were when they were my parents. My children are as old as I was. How many apples does Jenny have left?

~

How many times each day do I ask myself whether I have accomplished what I had hoped. You haven’t failed, I tell myself. But how much better it would be to reset everything today, to name a new goal for the next forty years, and to be forty again forty years from now.

~

At five, your whole life is imaginary, said my eight-year-old daughter. At forty, I say, only half your life is imaginary. But which