Mortal Geography

by Alexandra Teague

Drawing on sources as varied as ESL classroom discussions, a colonial travelogue, and the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, Alexandra Teague explores how language alternately empowers and fails us in this smart, searching, and accessible debut.

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2010

About the author

Alexandra Teague was born in Fort Worth, Texas, grew up in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and has since lived in Missouri, Montana, Florida (where she earned her MFA at the University of Florida in 1998), Hawaii, California, and Idaho. Her first book of poetry, Mortal Geography, (Persea 2010) won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award. Her second book, The Wise and Foolish Builders, was written and researched in part thanks to a 2011 NEA fellowship, and published by Persea in 2015. Her first novel, The Principles Behind Flotation, is newly out from Skyhorse. She is also, with Brian Clements and Dean Rader, an editor of the forthcoming anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence in the U.S. (Beacon, December 2017).

Alexandra's poetry has also appeared in anthologies including Best American Poetry 2009 and New California Writing 2012 and 2013, as well as journals including The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, and The Southern Review.

A 2006-2008 Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and winner of the 2014 Jeffrey E. Smith Missouri Review Editors' Prize, she is an Associate Professor in University of Idaho's MFA program, faculty advisor for Fugue, and an editor for Broadsided Press. She is also a founding member of the BASK Collective. She lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her husband, the musician and composer Dylan Champagne.

Reviews

[Rachel Metz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intelligent, accessible, wonderful poems. Read it!

[Elior · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an old sociology major I'm appreciative of the poem The Sociologist Dreams: "Their bodies float in the water./ She reaches to save them, but their hands turn to pages of numbers:// 35% of unmarried mothers sink below the line/ of poverty; 90% sink below the sea." Teague's poems spring from various interesting sources: a World War 2 photograph from the Philippines, an Edward Hopper painting, a Dungeons and Dragons manual, the experience of teaching English to immigrants, Glenn Gould, Frida and Diego, Choose Your Own Adventure books, Pliny the Elder's creepy thoughts on a Caesarean birth fatal to the mother being a good omen for the child ("To be born from a corpse, cut darkly toward breath,/ like spirit unsewn from the cloth of death/ was fortunate.").

One word that really comes to mind about these poems is "precise". They are very precise. Smartly constructed. I did feel that for me the emotional content, that power of a poem to really affect the reader, tailed off towards the latter half of the collection, but the first section, Dead Reckoning, is fairly brilliant.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times, Teague is a bit emotionally removed for my tastes, but there are some really great poems in this collection. The flashes of Bay Area landscape and vibe were a bonus for an ex-Berkeley and Palo-Alton.
And these snap shots rang true and new: "'Listen to your heart', this new man tells me. We are in a bar/ with red velvet curtains for sashes, sashes of conversation// draped under music. He pours rum and then Coke over ice,/ which rattles like elegant gravel. ..." and "If , on the other hand, you are concerned more with form than content,/ with raking the gravel of your soul/ into a Japanese garden,..."

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting and intelligent collection. Really technically proficient and powerful. (Smart enough that it made me feel fairly stupid at times but I don't at all mean that as a bad thing.)

Read "Two Drafts Written After A Fight" for an amazing look at the power of punctuation. And while it's clever, it's also a great poem on its own.

Definitely a collection worth checking out.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these poems. They talk about the difficulty of finding objective truth, but unlike a lot of poets that take this as their subject, Teague writes in narratives with precision, clarity, and honesty, not relying on irony or self-conscious maneuvering to "perform" her subject. A refreshing, beautifully crafted book.

[O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, accessible, full of story...



from "Color Theory"

To make things simple, I’d like one color
that will make me want to sing, cry, fuck, write letters

to strangers, wear fishnet stockings, buy irises, walk barefoot
listen to Coltrane, move out, stay forever,
have children, and understand winter. One can, well stirred.

[Collin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book. Moving, heart-felt, profound, and accessible. It amazes me that Teague, whose poems have appeared in multiple high-tiered publications and have even been included in Best American Poetry collections, isn't better known. It's a shame more people haven't read this book.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The way Teague uses repetition in several poems in this book is so very, very satisfying. I also particularly loved the poems on works of art (always a sucker for those), about living in Missouri/the Midwest and the Bay area/on the coast, and of teaching ESL (another always on that one).

[Elancharan Gunasekaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This you have to, read! Travel with each poem through struggles, emotions and worlds...

[Kelly Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

meah

[Laurel Perez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Teague is a bit emotionally removed for my tastes, but there are some really great poems in this collection. The poems spring from various interesting sources: a World War 2 photograph from the Philippines, an Edward Hopper painting, a Dungeons and Dragons manual, the experience of teaching English to immigrants, Glenn Gould, Frida and Diego, Choose Your Own Adventure books, Pliny the Elder's creepy thoughts on a Cesarean birth fatal to the mother being a good omen for the child. The work is clear, precise. BUT, the distance kept, kept me at bay, kept me from immersing, and that is why I give it 3 stars.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book because I really liked one of her poem's (Language Lessons) that I found on the American Life in Poetry website. I think Teague shines the most when she is talking about the classroom--her role as a teacher, her observations and relationships with her students. Some of her poetry seems really random to me, but I did find a few gems:

Adjectives of Order, Referral, Explanation to a Student, Two Drafts Written After a Fight (I'll show it to my students so they can see the power of punctuation.), Language Lessons, Arkansas Churches, English Fundamentals, Present Perfect.