Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You

From the first pages of Craig Beaven's memorable book, I care -- deeply -- about this speaker and his characters. Here is a white father trying to protect his Black children in a treacherous world. Here is a teacher whose students are twisted up in the maelstrom of racism and staggering gun violence. Craig Beaven deftly weaves the intimate with the global, the present and the past, heartache with humor. Toni Morrison said that she wanted expressions of goodness in her work to illuminate decisively the moral questions. It's no small accomplishment that Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You walks that path. -- Ellen Bass, Judge, Anhinga Prize for Poetry Craig Beaven's language isn't neutral or safe or defensive -- it wrestles with the never-ending violence of racism and school shootings. There's no gulf between the personal and the public here. There's no pretense of answers here. The poems speak to our current moment but also insist on the brutal nowness of the past. The craft, too, is urgent and astute. Lines surge forth, rich with ravishing music. Deft enjambment and splendidly built stanzas jolt, dazzle. These poems take risks that are long overdue. Read and share them.-- Eduardo C. Corral To write poetry from a parental perspective as Craig Beaven does so tenderly in his extraordinary new collection, Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, requires taking all of the vulnerability stirred up by our children and holding onto it tightly. That embrace isn't enough to fully protect them or us from the inescapable oppressions we've been bequeathed. But when transformed by a poet as gifted and capacious as Beaven, that hug becomes a way to push back against the trepidation. Worry is central to these elegant, meditative poems, yet Beaven finds opportunities to hold fear and wonder simultaneously. His poems are reminders that gentle revelations can inoculate even as they help us to embrace the momentary joys around us. --Adrian MatejkaWith insight into the constant, complicated work of the teacher and the parent, in Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You, Craig Beaven leads his reader with narrative verve and emotional keenness through waves of accruing implication and out far into the deep, troubled waters of race, violence, and our country's ever-unfolding, always troubled present moment. Beaven understands and shoulders the unresolvable weight of his task: "I don't want history / involved in this // embrace," he writes, "but history / is involved // in everything." -- Carrie Fountain