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 Matejka

With 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

TEACHING THE BABY TO SAY I LOVE YOU, Part 2

Every word the baby says is a word

we gave her, and some of them

never come back. It is

a difficult concept: culturally

we have located love in the heart, where it isn’t,

and we say it lives there, where it doesn’t,

and sometimes we love something

we can’t, like a movie

or song. Every word the baby says

is of the body — milk,

more, hungry. There is a long game

where she identifies animals

and their calls. The words we say

drawn in

like atmosphere. Today in class

Brady started a joke.

The joke

another hash mark

on the line of human history. This

is the oppressor’s language: we say

I love you

and the baby just laughs. It is

a kind of anxiety for us. When she was born

two years ago tomorrow

I had to shoulder in among nurses

swarming her pulse, breath,

under the light so bright and warm. She was iridescent

on white paper. At court for the adoption decree

they changed her last name to Beaven

and transposed birth year

to 2051, so when I filed

for her Social Security number

the guy couldn’t, pointing out

she won’t be born

for almost 40 years.

For a short while, in the oppressor’s

language, she called every animal fish,

which in the deep geological sense

is accurate; and for a period, in the oppressor’s

language, she reversed hi and bye, but

don’t all hellos end in farewells, and don’t

most farewells come back?

At forty gun deaths per day

we don’t report them

the way we do a mass shooting

because they’re all spread out

geographically. Individually

they happen

without public notice.

At school, teaching Night,

one kid — against reading

of any kind — said

it’s not like I’m at risk

of committing genocide.