Craig Morgan Teicher
-
Willie Perdomo's new collection is inspired by the salsa jam bands of '70s-era Puerto Rican New York. The poems are performance-page crossovers, rich in sound, slang and musical detail.
-
Nick Lantz's third collection, How to Dance as the Roof Caves In, could hardly be called cheerful. But his poems of divorce and recession are accessible and entertaining, even at their most grim.
-
The Book of Hours, Kevin Young's eighth collection, tracks the emotional extremes of a father's death and a son's birth. The poems present a gentle vision of mourning — a habitable kind of hurt.
-
Michael Benedikt was an exemplary poet, a dedicated editor and an agoraphobic recluse. His work was almost lost forever — until two poets rescued his archive and published a selection, Time is a Toy.
-
The Poetry Of Derek Walcott: 1948 - 2013 pulls from the Nobel laureate's large body of work. Fans might remember that the St. Lucian poet — who just turned 84 — published a Selected Works a few years ago. But the new book is more expansive and more enlightening, showing how Walcott's work has no parallel.
-
There's a lot to look forward to in the upcoming year, including collections about religious faith, books that push the boundaries of what we can call poetry and some poems that are too hot for your average English class. Critic Craig Morgan Teicher walks us through the highlights of the year ahead.
-
A new collection of Dickinson's poems — written on envelopes and found after her death — opens a rare porthole into the enigmatic writer's life and art. Literally and figuratively shaped by their unusual medium, the poems in The Gorgeous Nothings invite endless interpretations.
-
Stanley Crouch, one of the nation's most prominent jazz critics, is the author of the just-released Kansas City Lightning -- part one of a biography of Charlie "Bird" Parker. Reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher says the story starts a little slowly, but when Parker picks up the saxophone, Crouch's writing cooks.
-
The Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney died this morning in Dublin at the age of 74. In a remembrance, poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher writes that Heaney had mastered sound and nuance, crafting poems you can taste and feel, alive and powerful, as you speak them aloud.
-
The most anticipated collections of the year revisit the past and take us to the frontiers of language, borrowing from Twitter memes and overheard conversation, from the classics and bad movies.