Additional information
by Craig Beaven (Author)
In Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, Craig Beaven takes the reader on a heartfelt journey through the current American political landscape. In the first sequence, within the threat of classroom gun violence, he explores love, race, language, and terror. A second sequence makes those fears personal and individual, and the third traces these topics into a deep, historical roadtrip through the American South. He questions our ideas of terror in a world where dread and violence are perpetrated by the government, police officers, students, and neighbors hiding behind social media aliases. Throughout, Beaven's poems engage. Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You examines our present, often chaotic world, with a powerful weapon -- gripping, contemplative, and complex language.
Back Jacket
From the first pages of Craig Beaven's memorable book, I care -- deeply -- about this speaker and his characters. Here is a white father trying to protect his Black children in a treacherous world. Here is a teacher whose students are twisted up in the maelstrom of racism and staggering gun violence. Craig Beaven deftly weaves the intimate with the global, the present and the past, heartache with humor. Toni Morrison said that she wanted expressions of goodness in her work to illuminate decisively the moral questions. It's no small accomplishment that Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You walks that path.
-- Ellen Bass, Judge, Anhinga Prize for Poetry
Craig Beaven's language isn't neutral or safe or defensive -- it wrestles with the never-ending violence of racism and school shootings. There's no gulf between the personal and the public here. There's no pretense of answers here. The poems speak to our current moment but also insist on the brutal nowness of the past. The craft, too, is urgent and astute. Lines surge forth, rich with ravishing music. Deft enjambment and splendidly built stanzas jolt, dazzle. These poems take risks that are long overdue. Read and share them.
-- Eduardo C. Corral
To write poetry from a parental perspective as Craig Beaven does so tenderly in his extraordinary new collection, Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, requires taking all of the vulnerability stirred up by our children and holding onto it tightly. That embrace isn't enough to fully protect them or us from the inescapable oppressions we've been bequeathed. But when transformed by a poet as gifted and capacious as Beaven, that hug becomes a way to push back against the trepidation. Worry is central to these elegant, meditative poems, yet Beaven finds opportunities to hold fear and wonder simultaneously. His poems are reminders that gentle revelations can inoculate even as they help us to embrace the momentary joys around us.
--Adrian Matejka
With insight into the constant, complicated work of the teacher and the parent, in Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, Craig Beaven leads his reader with narrative verve and emotional keenness through waves of accruing implication and out far into the deep, troubled waters of race, violence, and our country's ever-unfolding, always troubled present moment. Beaven understands and shoulders the unresolvable weight of his task: "I don't want history / involved in this // embrace," he writes, "but history / is involved // in everything."
-- Carrie Fountain
