Foreign Object

Steven Teref’s hybrid collection Foreign Object follows in the lineage of his Balkan influences Vasko Popa, Novica Tadic, and Charles Simic. Teref populates his poems, experimental verse play, and translations with a horrific horde of nightmarians, ranging from the Slavic folkloric monster Baba Yaga to an all-too-real pedophiliac Babysitter. This collection heals yet disturbs as it slowly grows into its cancerous crescendo - the foreign object. Teref effortlessly switches between lyric and narrative modes through one-line poems, prose poems, and found poems. In Teref’s hands, his hometown of Somerville, MA, sheds its current hip veneer to expose its original working class Irish roots mired in alcoholism and domestic violence, so excruciating, that it can exist only through the figurative language of Slavic mythology, Coleridge’s Geraldine, and Musil’s Man Without Qualities. Ending this collection are Teref’s translations of Serbian poet Novica Tadic - an appropriate homage.