About This Title
August, September, October is a deep, touching meditation on fatherhood, time passing, and survival in a world reshaped by crisis. In two long, diaristic poems and a constellation of lyrical reflections, this collection traces the experiences of a poet—someone very much, though not exactly, like Craig Morgan Teicher—through the emotional and existential terrain of caregiving during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In the title poem, “August September October,” the speaker tends to his medically fragile son during a harrowing stretch of illness and hospitalization while pondering the deathbed book of Irish poet Ciaran Carson. The second extended poem, "Midsummer Days,” takes off from Bernadette Mayer’s classic Midwinter Day, following the speaker as he fails to write a memoir and climbs his way back to poetry and toward faith in a world overwhelmed by upheaval. Surrounding these central poems are shorter poems that meditate on grim games, the music of Sonny Rollins, memories of being a young writer, the tyranny of TV screens, and the insane politics of our time.
August, September, October offers a deeply human snapshot of a family navigating disability, grief, and fleeting hope, all while trying to keep the imagination alive in an age of catastrophe.
Praise for August, September, October
“This gutsy book blazes with the glory of a father's love for his son. It tells the story of Craig, Brenda, Cal, Simone, and Cashew, the dog. Written amidst night feeds, trips to the hospital, antibiotics, and the coil of everyday life, it seems proof that poetry cannot be stamped out. In this raw, gem-like, reliquary of a book, Teicher has transmuted anger, grief, and loss into a most durable celebration of love.” —Henri Cole, author of The Other Love
“Craig Morgan Teicher has picked the bones out of what once was a memoir and used its bones to build a tower so delicate and high and magnificent, the only name beautiful and impossible enough to give this tower is POEM. I climbed up to the very top, and I may never come down. The view from up here is unlike anything you've ever seen.” —Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
“Craig Morgan Teicher makes poetry the way William Carlos Williams did, out of his life, his love, and his love of literature, yes. Aware of how the intense now has already turned into the abstracted then. This work occurs in the now and then, is filled with details of his family suffering, of the world aflame, but the terror is in a distance that knows it's already happened—even a time scheme of three months implies a blurring, the most frightening event, eventuality, is a past, no matter the grammar. And yet these poems feel so present, so...emerging. And the terror is part of the beautiful, when it happens. And even ‘the hissing leaves have a part to play.’"
—Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth
Excerpt from “BIRTHDAY POEM”
She’s a clever dog, but she can’t understand
that the leash—a fifty footer I staked
out back so she can explore our patch of land—
is tangling, trailing her like a wake
or like a crayon’s line looping through
a placemat maze. She ambles a few feet
to sniff a clump of leaves, slaloms between two
poles beneath the deck, then visits the slab of concrete
where I sit at the pandemic picnic table writing.
Then she doubles back to find a place to pee.
The leash has been recording
her every turn, and her territory,
which was the whole wide yard, is diminishing.
Bewildered, suddenly stuck, she’s me.
