Flashlight: New and Selected Poems by Gayl Teller

Gayl Teller’s poetic eye works like a flashlight illuminating wider and wider swaths of reality and human interconnectedness. From the basketball courts in the Bronx beach club, where she met her husband, to her Hofstra University students, the people she befriends on her travels, like the tour guide in Prague, from her thoughts at her granddaughter's Bat Mitzvah, to her present Plainview community with its Sunday Y poets, dancers, mah jongg players, her language opens out with essential truths of the human condition, how despite vast cultural, ethnic, and individual differences, we share common needs, frailties, struggles, and dreams. Her flashlight embraces our common human family.

Sample Poems by Gayl Teller

“I am drawn to these poems because of their creativity, their deft precision of observation, their gorgeous language, and redemptive messages. Teller’s poems resonate on the deepest level, are elegant tapestries of carefully stitched words with a reverence for detail, each a panorama of exceptional color giving voice to the experience. Her poems strike deeply, speak of our common longings, shared pain, and our loves. The voice in this collection is sure, refined, playful at times, and wise. The diction is powerfully intimate, skillfully universal. These poems have a subtle sonic ringing within, a sense of transcendence, a reverence for the common passage we humans share. The range of this collection is amazing, as is her lush, empathetic utterances of what it is to survive in our world, and what we might have learned from the experience.”—Gladys L. Henderson, Poet Laureate Suffolk County 2017-2019; author of Eclipse of Heaven, Finishing Line Press, 2008

ISBN: 978-1625493316, 236 pages

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Gayl had a review of Flashlight appear in the July 2024 issue of The Scene.

"Sometimes I play a game with myself, that my wish to go back in time to this very day and this very bounty of my life, at this very moment has been granted from some high walled future I can't begin to imagine."—Gayl Teller “Funneling Sun,” from Flashlight

“Eyes are a window into the soul. The essence of one's life. A flashlight into the ether. As a flashlight beams into the unknown, so does the poetry collection titled Flashlight by Gayl Teller, who is a former Nassau County Poet Laureate.”…

For more information, visit The Scene.