Kirjahaku

In Spinning Tea Cups: A Mythical American Memoir, Alexandra Teague explores cycles of family trauma and both the dangerous and recuperative powers of fantasy. Teague attempts to understand and contextualize her “feral Victorian” family in terms of trauma and mental health, but also with deep love and humor. How did people who prided themselves on making everything from scratch take annual trips to Disney World? What did it mean that Teague’s mother claimed to have psychic abilities? How did her sensitive youngest nephew end up talking in a voice that wasn’t his own? Why did Teague, the daughter of educated non-conformist parents, marry as a teenager (with her parents’ blessing) and spend seven years in an abusive relationship? How do family legacies of grief and dysfunction and creativity intersect? How do any of us make meaning or escape our circumstances without replicating the fantasies or escapism with which we’ve been raised? Teague is carefully attuned to the vagaries of geographical cultures, and she weaves her family’s history and weighty explorations of trauma and psychology not just with pop culture but with the specific cultures of the places she and her family pass through: the Bay Area, a tiny college town in the Inland Northwest, a Southwest ghost town, a Texas city, an Arkansas hippie bubble, and Central Florida suburb. Spinning Tea Cups will appeal to readers interested in American cultural studies, those concerned with the ongoing crisis of mental illness in this country, and those who simply love strange, quirky, richly told stories.

This chilling new collection by the author of Mortal Geography (winner of the California Book Award in poetry) is a verse exploration of American progress and its consequences, featuring rifle heiress Sarah Winchester and her unsettling Mystery House, with cameos by Harry Houdini, Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill and many other fascinating figures. Steeped in history yet wildly imaginative, these poems commune with Winchester s haunted legacy and that of westward expansion, connecting voices from a troubled past with their irrepressible present-day echoes. The Wise and Foolish Builders is an unmistakable accomplishment by a poet of remarkable formal skill and fantastic originality."

This heartrending and darkly playful new collection by Alexandra Teague tries to understand the edges of self in a patriarchal culture and in relation to a family history of mental illness and loss. In poems that mix high art and popular culture (from classical Greek statues to giant plaster artichokes, Cubism to Freudian Disney dolls), Teague interweaves self-reflection with the stories and lives of mythic and historic female figures, such as the dangerous-wise witch Baba Yaga and early-20th-century sculptors' model Audrey Munson--calling across time and place to explore desire, grief, and the representation and misrepresentation of the female form.