Visiting Writers' Series Presents Brian Teare

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 7:30 PM EDT
Research Hall, #163

(Note: we regret to report that Jean Valentine, who was to visit on Tuesday, April 12, has had to cancel, but we are pleased to announce that Brian Teare has agreed to visit on the same day.)

Brian Teare’s newest book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, has just been released by Ahshata Press. In the book, Teare “explores paradox,” Ahshata Press says about the book. “Teachers are sought and rejected (the Buddha, Christian thinkers, an Abstract Expressionist painter); illness is at once personless violence and a means of perfection; the body, both physical and a nostalgic memory from the days before sickness. There is also heaven itself: something Agnes Martin’s Buddhist readings would insist is possible and current on earth, but a notion that the sufferer ruptures by existing. The space of the hospital—designed to be as utilitarian and perfect as graph paper, filled however with blood tests, nausea, vomiting, weeping—becomes a palpable hell. Teare’s title is in this way wishful thinking, a goal prayed for: perhaps the form of the body, emptied of the illness that entered it uninvited, can attain heaven, though altered by messy suffering. Indeed, the calmed body may be a new object entirely, as void as it is beautifully scarred by its new understanding: ‘form empties itself / on its way to heaven.’”

Teare’s earlier collections include The Room Where I Was Born (2003), winner of the Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Sight Map (2009); and Pleasure (2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and Companion Grasses (2013), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was named one of Slate’s best poetry books of 2013. His poetry also has appeared in anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006).

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