Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey

In his fourth book of poetry, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey, Craig Morgan Teicher writes with a dreamy, dark humor of middle age, suburban parenting, and nuclear family life. In one poem, the speaker, wary of thirty children descending upon his house for his daughter’s birthday party, imagines a parallel unchosen life of “artful despondency, / a hermit’s wise and barren bliss.” The poem “Ode” opens with the speaker feeling resentful of the family puppy: “How new / everything is / to the puppy,” before identifying with her fear of “only / what she cannot understand.” In a way, the book is more about theorizing puppy-ness, childhood, potential, and vitality than it is about adulthood, parenting, regret, or fatigue.

From sonnet sequence to prose poem, the poet wrestles not so much with aging, but with routine longevity (“If only not wanting to die was enough to keep me alive”) and making memories with his family that will be able to “feed the thin heart on a dry day.” In “Assurances 2,” the speaker insists, “I am, basically, a good person—I know this because not even once have I locked my children in the house alone, gotten in my car, and driven forever.” I wonder if these abandonment fantasies of fathers, well documented in our literary canon, folk songs, and culture, need be stated, or whether they can ever even be ironic.

The book is at its most deft and the poet at his most mortal when talking about sleep and wakefulness. Between these two realms, there continues to be the hazy routines of keeping alive, but at the poles of consciousness drifting in and out, in poems such as “Late Fireworks” or “Dialogue between Married Poets,” the book enters an exquisite uncertainty where the poet, free from his daily realism, can play, flirt, sing, breathe.