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

“I have the reassembled heart./ It hearts you.” The mix of oddball phraseology and quiet pathos in this second collection from Teig (Big Back Yard) should charm many readers and confuse some others; in his image-rich free verse, the boundaries between cause and effect, the lines separating people, animals, vegetables, and manufactured products nearly disappear, creating a space part pastoral, part postmodern, and close to the poet’s peers and models in western Massachusetts and Eastern Europe, from Tomasz Salamun to Dara Wier. In one anxious poem, “it’s April everywhere/ so incredible/ and smashing everyone/ who looks at it.” In another, “I saw my nose was the prow/ of a boat, the night filling with fingerprints./ Onward, I whispered.” Teig (who cofounded the magazine jubilat) can pass from exhilaration to exhaustion, using his changeable, metaphor-laden technique to imagine a person who carries the weight of adulthood: “I made a clearing where the shouting world piles up/ dimly on the horizontal, as it always has.” Such sentences move from one point to another in a way very close to the way we talk now, so that only their kaleidoscopic images set them above the ordinary hum and oddity of daily life. His quieter moments, and his humor, might give this collection all the notes it needs, as when he contributes a punning “Poultry Chronicle”: “the stars drop down,// the coast drifts away and my chicken/ drifts like a boat in a bowl.” (Nov.)