Timeless yet timely and hopeful with a dark underbelly, these fables revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin. With a poet's mastery, Craig Morgan Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and the people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly behaving gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room. Craig Morgan Teicher is poetry editor ofPublishers Weekly and a vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. From The Brooklyn Rail: "The great challenge of literature is always changing, is as mutable as our striving and forgetful cultures- but always, it is some part of the author's job description to strip away our truisms and describe the gaping unknown. Teicher, in Cradle Book, sits somewhere on the other side, and transmits." From Powell's Books: "Instead of the artifical clarity of the carefully orchestrated life evident in so much narrative realism, these pieces seek to explore what we don't understand, to open up questions that lead to more questions...Fables in the truest sense, these exquisite stories offer a sense of wonder even as they lead us deeper and deeper into the darkness of the unconscious."