There's a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick

Michael Teig’s long-awaited second collection is the perfect poetry companion: witty, intriguing, and self-effacing as it picks up overheard conversations and the accidental encounters of everyday life. As Stephen Dobyns wrote, Teig’s poems “have this ability to make the world fresh again and make us realize once again why we love the world, despite its failings and our own.”

“under one box another box”

I head off like an inventory
             like a kindergarten
under one box is a pie
             the sky too is a box
                          into which
we turn to each other
              take stock

maybe the sky accidentally
             knocks over a box
so that a new person spills out
and gets included

Praise for There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick

“In this beautiful book, Michael Teig maps the mercurial terrain of the imagination with such equipoise you may forget you’re dreaming just as these pages are so soaked with the miraculous everyday, you may forget you’re awake. Imagine getting a letter from a zinnia. Deft as an owl landing in a blossoming cherry tree, these are gorgeously uncanny and regal poems.” —Dean Young

“With a title like this—There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick—is there really a whole lot left to say? With cunning and quintessential stealth, with artful restraint, with what’s fathering and foxy and filled with intelligence and wit, Michael Teig goes about making what seems to be invisible and unspeakable, the most palpable and important matter in the world.” —Dara Wier

“I’ve been reading and loving Michael Teig’s poems for years. His first book, Big Back Yard, is full of direct language that leads us to places of true strangeness. Reading this new book, I experience that same intertwining of the ordinary and the dream, along with something deeper, a very moving emotional precision that is not merely about his own, but somehow all of our lives. When he writes a simple line like, ‘My chicken has pointy ears/ like a forest’ or ‘Hear that? That’s/ our lawn dying,’ he has the old wisdom of Central European masters like Atilla Joszef (whom he quotes in his epigraph) and Vasko Popa, but in the mind of a young American poet, which is a very strange and powerful combination. I want to be with the mind who thinks about the world in that way, and thankfully holding this book I can be.” —Matthew Zapruder

“Brimming with wit ... Teig’s second book of poems has one of the boldest titles in poetry-book history, and he follows his standout title with highly imaginative poems boasting imagery with passionate reach. Nearly every poem in this collection can be viewed as a picturesque mural that doesn’t quite make sense,yet, curiously, leads to wonder and excitement ... It is quite possible that Teig has inherited the mantle of William Carlos Williams’ ‘Red Wheelbarrow.’ But there is nothing here that is definitive, and that is the point.” —Booklist

About the Author

Michael Teig is the author of Big Back Yard (BOA Editions, 2003), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in such journals as FIELD, Conduit, Black Warrior Review, Bateau, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, and A Public Space. Teig is co-founder and editor of jubilat and holds degrees from Oberlin College and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Academy of American Poets, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Teig lives in Easthampton, MA, with his wife and son.

Publication Date: November 5, 2013
ISBN:  978-1-938160-20-2

© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2013