"I needed to understand how I read the world around me, and how I'd come to read it that way."
Brian Teare's (b. 1974) poetry is concerned with embodiment—both our human bodies and the natural environment around us. His work attempts to express, as he calls them, "wordless and interior" states while facing the complexity of doing so through verbal abstraction and formal experimentation. Teare's most recent work responds to encounters with the natural world, and focuses on oil, water, and environmental disaster. A former NEA Fellow in Literature, he has been a resident at Headlands Center for the Arts and MacDowell, and a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship. In 2014, he was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Teare is the author of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and Companion Grasses (Omnidawn Publishing, 2013), as well as three other books and seven chapbooks. His work has been anthologized in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral; Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability; Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and others. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University.
