Bøker av Alexandra Teague

In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors--and in which Yeats' famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements--[ominous music intensifying] takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. In this fourth book of poetry, Alexandra Teague expands her subject matter to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and what it means to stay safe--physically and psychologically. Her new poems are reckonings with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, torture devices and sad clown paintings--and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.

In these quirky and richly told tales, Alexandra Teague brings readers along for the wild ride of her youth, traversing wide swaths of the American landscape in the company of a talking puppet, Victorian ghosts, and a family fueled by fantasy, dysfunction, and fierce love. Why did people who shunned the culture of consumerism and prided themselves on making everything from scratch take annual trips to Disney World, the mecca of mass-manufactured fun? Did her mother really have psychic abilities? Why did her sensitive youngest nephew speak in a voice that wasn't his own? How do family legacies of grief and dysfunction and creativity intersect? How can she escape her circumstances without replicating the escapist fantasies with which she was raised? Teague attempts to understand and contextualize her family in terms of trauma and mental health, but also with deep love and humor. Carefully attuned to the vagaries of geographical cultures, she weaves her family's history with explorations of pop culture and the specific cultures of the places she and her family pass through: a Texas city, an Arkansas Victorian tourist town, a Southwest ghost town, Central Florida, the Bay Area, Kansas City, and Moscow, Idaho--a college town in the Inland Northwest.a college town in the Inland Northwest. 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 anyone seeking to explore the dangerous and recuperative powers of fantasy.