LITANY FOR THE CITY by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman
Litany for the City 

BOA Editions 
http://www.boaeditions.org/ 

By the numbers
ISBN 9781934414804 
Publication: 2012 
Total pages: 80 
Number of poems: 21

__________

(This review was first posted in Poetry Matters.)

I first met Ryan Teitman in 2009 when he was a student attending Indiana University’s MFA program. I'm an admirer of his poetry and when I saw that he had published his first book (a prize-winner no less),  I jumped at the chance to share it with you.  Fortunately, he also agreed to an interview, so click here to read the interview and learn more about this talented poet. He’s definitely one to watch. 

—Nancy Chen Long

__________

Ryan Teitman’s first book of poetry Litany for the City was selected by Jane Hirshfield as the 2012 winner of the A. Pouling, Jr. Poetry Prize, published by BOA Editions. Litany for the City is a meditation on place, the importance of place, the embodiment of place, the conflation of place and body. Teitman provides structure for the reader through the theme of city / place / location—from consideration of a city such as Philedelphia, to a place like that of a dry wheat field (“Ephesians”), to the tender location on the body, a “patch of jawbone hidden by the earlobe” (“Vespers”). In addition, 

Pulitzer Remix for National Poetry Month

April is Poetry Month! To celebrate, I've joined the Pulitzer Remix, sponsored by The Found Poetry Review. There are 85 poets across 7 countries participating. Each poet will create found poetry from one of the 85 Pulitzer Prize winners. 85 poets, a poem a day, 30 days.  

If you go to the site (www.pulitzerremix.com/), you'll see the book covers of all 85 Pulitzer Prize winners. Click on a title to read the day's poem from that book. If you want to know more, here's a link to the project: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/about/ .

My book is GUARD OF HONOR, the 1949 Pulitzer winner by James Gould Cozzens. If you want to check on how I'm doing, starting on April 1, I'll be remixing here: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/category/guard-of-honor. You'll see an image of the book cover for each day. If you hover over the image, you'll see the day the poem was posted and  a teaser line. Click on the image to read that day's poem.

Interview with Poet Ryan Teitman

Every clock in our house
had unfinished business.
Every note my father
struck in the dark
before he left for work
was another life waiting—

-from “Hard Light Through Hemlock,” by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman, a 2004 graduate of Penn State’s English Department, is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City. This, his first book, won the A. Poulin Jr. Prize and is published by BOA Editions. Teitman, formerly the Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the recipient of an  AWP Intro Journal Award in poetry, the winner of the Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition, and a finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, and many other journals. Teitman worked as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia before earning an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English at Indiana University. He currently works as the Emerging Writing Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

*   *   *

Ryan and I met in 2009 at Indiana University. He was a student in IU’s MFA program and I had the wonderful good fortune to read a few of his