The first and last poem in Craig Morgan Teicher's "To Keep Love Blurry" redeem the book and earn it two stars instead of one. The rest of the poems largely consist of what I'd call trite thoughts put to paper seemingly unedited. The majority of the book deals with the death of a mother, a rocky marriage, and a loss of self-definition following a job loss. These could be weighty topics for a poem, if they were deftly handled, but here the poems are very personalized, not at all universal, and come across more as whining than thoughtful reflections. I kept wanting to scream at the author, "Everyone's life is full of struggle and pain, you're not the only one, but what do you do with the pain?" The answer in poem after poem was that the author wallows in self-pity. The first and last poems were the only ones that addressed a larger universe outside the author's ego and made no direct mention of personal struggles, and for that they were a breath of fresh air. ( )