Brian Teare
“I am very aware that poetry has, even the best, the most public of poetry has a limited sort of efficacy. It’s not policy, and it’s not environmental policy. It’s not direct action. But I still take the ethical work of the poem and its responsibilities seriously. To the reader and the context.”
“Teare’s exquisite latest (after Doomstead Days) defies genres as it engages with queer artistic legacy and process. Moving fluidly from prose to verse, the collection takes formal inspiration from collage, assembling itself from the history of queer artists like Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin, an illness journal, and ruminations on writing and visual art…Ultimately, it is “not perfection/ but the inevitable/ form of the idea” that Teare seeks. This dazzling consideration of queer art and life will challenge and enlighten its readers.”
“Brian Teare’s surprising, engrossing Poem Bitten by a Man concerns many things, and the intersections between those things: The chronically ill body, its troubles, pain, and attempts to heal. A love affair and its demise. The artists Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin, their personalities and obsessions and inspiration, their lives in art and in America. Caregiving and receiving. Late-stage capitalism. Queerness. Whiteness. Being from and leaving the South. Teare has found a way, in this complicated, indefatigable, entertaining, fascinating collage of notebook fragments, quotations, verse lines, and prose paragraphs, to get so much of life and its connected, disconnected events all together while resisting any urge to sanitize its messes, normalize its ambitions and longings, or attempt falsely to assuage the reality of trouble and toil and pain. Theoretical without being esoteric, uncompromising and also uncertain, thoughtful about economic, artistic, and physical realities, resolutely inconclusive and full of ideas, Poem Bitten by a Man is a marvelous book that tells a story even as the story it tells continually falls apart.”
“For all the anguish that Brian Teare’s assemblage brings into focus, Poem Bitten by a Man evinces a surprisingly classical serenity and equipoise, its varied elements (art criticism, biography, autobiography, poetry, political analysis) splayed around a composed core, an authorial eye and ear that know the exact dosage that the music requires. I admire the mental legerdemain of this book’s performance of care and distress, and I feel, with the intimacy of a linguistic caress, the gestures it makes toward imagining poetry’s future possibilities.”
“The poems feel solitary but intimate: Teare’s voices let us weigh the insoluble questions of how to live as an ethical being in the face of violence and environmental collapse.”
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently Poem Bitten by a Man (Nightboat Books, 2023), winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta 2015 / Nightboat 2022). Together they form a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage. Other books include Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards, Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), named one of 2013’s Best Poetry Books by Slate, the Poetry Foundation, and the Volta, and Pleasure (Ahsahta Press, 2010), winner of a 2011 LAMBDA Literary Award. Earlier books are Sight Map (University of California Press, 2009, and The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). A selected essays, Dissident Intuition, will be out in Fall 2027, followed by Transcendental Grammar: Three Early Books in Spring 2028, both from Nightboat Books.
After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, Brian is now a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. His other honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
A respected and sought-after educator, Brian has visited writing programs, classrooms, and poetry institutions across the United States. He is regularly on the faculty of Napa Valley Writers Conference and of the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. A former Elliston Poet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati, Helen Zell Visiting Writer at the University of Michigan, and Allen Ginsberg Fellow at Naropa University, Brian is available for readings, lectures, workshops, and classroom visits.
“How do we live among the wreckage of what’s been spilled? Syllables hum with the felt sense of the poet, whose sweat wets the notebook as he walks. Teare has composed lyrics as formally meticulous and sonically aware as they are expansive, pleasurable, and unforgettable.”
“I’m floored by [The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven’s] formal bravery and structural accomplishments, moved so much by the travail of the body of B (as I’ve been calling it, in my mind).”
“American poetics has never strayed far from a vigilant entwined apprehension, where a meticulous naming or reading of nature’s phenomena becomes an intelligence of the world’s immanent possibilities. From Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson on, the rigors of observation have laid claim to the spirit’s desire to find its form in the saturated repository of language. Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses is a glorious, daring continuance: “I was making language / a stem to aspire to.”
“The painful rip of the body away from a state of erotic joy to one of stunned aloneness is here explored in a garden of strange and thorny flowers, a garden in which the poet is tempted by the Gnostic vision of reality, because it is so cruelly true to his experience.”
“Sight Map engages the chaos and the dark of our cultural moment while illustrating how inspired thinking and inspired music feed into each other, rewarding us with a ‘voice / full-throated with noticing.”
“Sensual, and smart as blazes, the poet’s language, with its hypnotic recapitulations of image and motif, moves us to the deepest of interiors, the secret-holding chambers of the human heart. Teare’s book is almost miraculously gracious and forgiving.”
Open and right-click to download
©K Finn
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
