Cradle Book
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Timeless yet timely and hopeful with a dark underbelly, these fables revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin. With a poet’s mastery, Craig Morgan Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and the people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly behaving gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.
Craig Morgan Teicher is poetry editor of Publishers Weekly and a vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PW editor Teicher s second book is a marvel of storytelling, but of course we d say that.Cradle BookCraig Morgan TeicherBOA (Consortium, dist.),$14 paper (72p) Thirty-three sublime, deceptively simple reflections on states of human awareness comprise this prose collection by poet Teicher (Brenda Is in the Room), who is also PW s poetry editor. In bedtime-story selections grouped under themes of Silence, Fear, Sleep, Teicher gives voice to our suppressed terrors of the dark, animism, unclean urges, and supernatural convergences: a man is granted the wish of invisibility in The Reward, using the power to observe everything he can until he becomes a repository... of moments that threaten to repeat themselves for all eternity, in short, a poet; dust collecting in clumps in corners takes on life as it is simply waiting for us to join it ( The Dust ); a tree stump finds a remedy for its acute loneliness by engulfing a monk in its gnarled roots so that they can die together ( The Monk and the Stump ). The immutable condition of the stone becomes the metaphor for life in The Story of the Stone. Teicher s subtly composed fables are effortless and enduring, celebrate the virtue of story above all, and render philosophers of his readers.
