Teeter

Through mixing, collaging, and looping, these poems become vehicles for both embodiment and investigation of the subject: sound—as music, as language, as simultaneously instinctive and cultural-political. . . . This book is not just a collection of noise, but a move toward reframing what exactly experimental poetry is “over time,” both collectively and individually.

Comprised of three long poems, Teeter knows experimental forms can be as intimate as mothering; knows we can understand languages we do not speak. . . . Teeter’s lessons in listening reverberate across career retrospectives and heritage languages, colonial histories and domestic intimacies, reattuning us to what we’ve neglected to notice in our efforts to create a life we can understand.

[Alidio’s] work, pedagogic and poetic, is that of a dexterous maker and attuned hearer. Teeter, her fourth full-length poetry book, marks the apex of a language poet’s work, where making occurs alongside documenting but does not extract from it and in which hearing surrounds language but does not acquire, master, or own it.

Teeter’s capacious brilliance brings to light a poetics of friction that teaches us that language is also a site of struggle, noncompliance, humor, and beauty. The stakes are high and infused with a kind of phonemic magic. Language is material and transforms materiality. To believe in language as material and action is to believe it can enable access through unconventional routes just as much as it can blockade. . . Teeter torques utterance into a revolution, a turning, a disordering of value on every conceivable level—semantic, syntactic, sonic.