Poetry. LGBT Studies. Winner of the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Like Tennyson's In Memoriam, Teare's book sees within a personal loss evidence of an epochal shift at work, a shift at once historical, political, and cosmological. Asserting the lover's body as a lost Eden, revisiting again and again the narrative of "the fall"—its iconic imagery as well as Gnostic reinterpretations—the book also records the eventual end of mourning and a return to the ecology not of myth but of the literal weather and landscape of California. The book is haunted throughout by the task of "writing the disaster" of AIDS; its lyrics link emergency to inquiry in an attempt to make a memorial "in language sufficient/to pain : not in itself the world : the thought of it."

Author City: PHILADELPHIA, PA USA

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Brian Teare's books and chapbooks include The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, Transcendental Grammar Crown. He lives in San Francisco, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
Rita Dove's List of Young Poets to Watch @ Bill Moyers & Company
Rusty Morrison @ Ron Slate's On the Seawall
Joel Brouwer @ Ron Slate's On the Seawall
Rigoberto González's 10 Outstanding Small Press Titles of 2010 @ National Book Critics Circle
Michael Klein @ Lambda Literary
interview by Stephen Motika @ Lambda Literary
Rachel Zucker's Favorite Poetry Books @ 32 Poems
Natalie Eilbert @ The Rumpus
Kristin Gecan @ Poetry Foundation staff's favorite books of 2011