Inside the Embrace, Poems by Gayl Teller

The poems of Gayl Teller’s Inside the Embrace move deftly and briskly through their subject, gathering all aspects of the world into their warm embrace.

Sample Poems by Gayl Teller

“Gayl Teller’s poems are like ‘Learning the Facts,’ showing us both harsh truths and ways we can cope with them. Together, they bring us Inside the Embrace of an important American poet.”—David B. Axelrod

“In Teller’s new collection we are offered gritty, inventive, and compassionate poems that celebrate private and public worlds. The 9/11 calamity of an attack on the Pentagon is set against Maxine’s mandolin whose music sends out herbal scents. The heady joy of a grandchild effervesces in a series of deftly made triads. Sharply focused, loneliness takes the field as the poet eavesdrops on drifting cell phone chatter. Elsewhere, a history of the horse weaves into a rich and intricate narrative. One grows out of breath with admiration for this wise and touching poet whose vibrant language reverberates in memory.”—Colette Inez

“Gayl Teller’s poetry shows a real sense of commitment to language and its possibilities within a poem. Her deep humanity is as apparent as her careful craftsmanship. Her work is intelligent, sensitive, and open. One comes away with a true feeling of being engaged in her world, her vision, and her themes. She conjures up, to quote Dylan Thomas, ‘the colour of saying’ in poems that really add to one’s own existence and experience.”—Peter Thabit Jones

“At their best, as in ‘Silently and Ceaselessly’ and ‘Jasmine,’ Gayl Teller’s passionate, densely layered, and often tender poems register the always difficult, sometimes awkward or comic, and frequently turbulent events that mark our lifelong journey from the airy lightness and innocence of childhood to the darker and heavier world of adult responsibility, disillusionment, and regret. Inside the Embrace is like a fine-tuned seismograph that registers the small changes and large-scale upheavals of the human condition.”—Charles Ades Fishman

Nassau County Poet Laureate for 2009-2011, Gayl Teller was educated at Columbia University and Queens College, CUNY. Her poetry collections are At the Intersection of Everything You Have Ever Loved, Shorehaven, Moving Day, and One Small Kindness. Director and founder of the Poetry Reading Series, under the auspices of the New York State Council on the Arts, at the Mid-Island Y JCC, in Plainview, NY, for the past fourteen years, she has been teaching in the English department of Hofstra University since 1985. Finalist for Nassau County Poet Laureate in 2007, she has conducted numerous poetry workshops and seminars and been the featured reader at many universities, poetry centers, and libraries. Her work has received the Edgar Allan Poe Prize, the Peninsula Library Poetry Prize, a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Prize, a National League of American PEN Women Prize, and The Connecticut Writer Prize; One Small Kindness was a finalist for the Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her poems are widely published and anthologized, and her reviews of poetry books have appeared frequently in Small Press Review. Her website is http://www.gaylteller.com/.

ISBN: : 978-1934999998, 100 pages

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