August, September, October

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 that accrue into a day book of sorts, this collection traces the daily 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.