As a poet, Ginger Teppner, is an architect, a textile weaver, a master builder of places where there had once only been sensation and longing. Her propensity for evolving the world into nouns creates spaces that can only exist in language—a world where the thoughts and feelings we cannot express can live and, for a moment, we are free of the pain of the limits of our bodies. Somehow, these spaces do not only exist on the page or in her voice. She embodies them as a teacher, as a mother, and as a friend. To know her is to be held entirely and with the same gentleness and consideration as the gorgeous language she creates. 

Entering Ginger’s work is like waking up in a field of clothes hung out to dry. As you move you feel the sharpness of the lemon-yellow sun graze the back of your neck between damp sheets, you smell the bloom of a lilac, you hear the flutter and screech of birds looking for food before an evening rain comes, telling you an evening rain is coming, telling you to feel the coldness at the end of a gust of wind and know an evening rain is coming. You feel the pain of the memory. Not nostalgia. Not a memory of the past. A memory that is and was here now with you, and the pain is knowing that it can somehow only live in this place and you will have to leave. And she is the linen—blocking your view, forcing you to feel your way, occasionally reaching up in the breeze to brush your cheek.  She is the movement in the fracture.

                                 -Andrew Helton

                 Photo credit: Scott Murph