Poetry

Cradle Book

Timeless yet timely, hopeful with a dark underbelly, the fables and stories in Cradle Book revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin. With a poet’s mastery, Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and 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.

“Wrapped lightly in philosophy and whimsy and wisdom, here's a book to be savored, and revisited, and read aloud. Teicher is brewing some elegant magic here.”

—Aimee Bender

“Populated with account-keeping birds, wolves whose ‘bite is like a breeze,’ an invisible man, a nameless man, and children who find dust balls and ‘care for particular clumps as pets,’ Teicher’s stories are full of mystery and doubt and despair. These are fables with the hearts of haiku. Their conclusions, if they may even be termed as such, are full of question marks and quicksand and rabbit holes. A writer imagines writing a line that goes through the paper and into the horizon and writes, ‘I will follow that line until there is no next thing’; a story can’t settle on its subject; men die and become crows. With the lightest touch, Teicher prods at our human mysteries, cloaking a very real and complex view of the world we live in through the language and staging of fairytale, diorama, and dream.”

—Matthea Harvey

The Wolves

Wolves rule these woods. They have overthrown the old rulers, conquered all the creatures, and now these woods belong to them. But do not be afraid if you pass this way. There is nothing here that can harm you, because, of course, the wolves are made of something less than air. Their bite is like a breeze. When they run a few leaves shake. Perhaps a flower bends when they howl. Pass through the woods whenever you like. What you have to fear is not in the woods.

Available editions:

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Price: $14.00

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FormatPaperback

Publication DateMay 1, 2010

ISBN978-1-934414-36-1

$14.00

About the Author

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems: Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; 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 Little Mr. Prose Poem: The Selected Poems of Russell Edson (BOA, 2022) 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.