Big Back Yard

Teig's poems display his ability to -create surprising metaphors and images. These are integrated seamlessly into startlingly original poems, which, though often difficult, aren't inaccessible. "With Teig I could never calculate the poem's direction," Stephen Dobyns writes in his Foreword. "Yet where the poem wound up . . . felt exactly right, while the ride itself, the reading experience, gave great pleasure."Michael Teig earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, where he studied with Dara Wier and the late Agha Shahid Ali. He founded the literary magazine Jubilat, which operates out of the UMass campus. Currently, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he works as a freelance writer and editor while continuing to run Jubilat.