Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems

This first book ...has the plainspokenness and unguarded candor about writing and ambition more often found in a later book by an established poet - think Robert Creeley....Teicher puts his faith in the hypothetical 'as if,' as if being in love with poetry made poetry, as if being in love made love....Part of the charm here is how poetry and love are not suffered ironically, but gathered and won, 'As if the answer is flowers ' - a surprisingly sage observation for this young poet who indeed has something to say.'
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems is a beautiful and original work that appears to be, on first impression, a light-hearted and amusingly self-conscious account of daily life. Brenda (the author's then fiancée, now wife) is indeed in the room. Because she and the world are loved, the everyday is lyrically charged: 'therefore allow me to look / out into a world about which / I have something to say: / were I able to see it all - how / the trees really smell, how the wind actually blows .../ I think / my mouth would be too full / to speak.' ...As soon as I had read the book, I wanted immediately to read it again, for its pebble that is also a planet; for its one-celled organism that, to regenerate the world, 'sings the world's last song.''
—Paul Hoover, author of Poems in Spanish and Edge and Fold

[M]any poems engage the imagination and do what great poetry should: remind us that our mundane lives, and the mere fact of language, are utterly strange and magical.'
—Marit MacArthur, The Bloomsbury Review