Poem Bitten by a Man - Paperback

by Brian Teare (Author)

Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award
Finalist for the 2024 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

Collaged from journals and notebooks kept during a period of chronic illness, economic precarity, and heartbreak, Poem Bitten By a Man captures crisis by cutting up the record of a queer life lived in devotion to poetry and visual art.

A medical emergency, a road trip, a breakup, and a paean to the power of creative process--Poem Bitten by a Man is for everyone who has tried against the odds to make a life in art, whether they succeeded or not. Using somatic language captured through a notebook practice, Teare recontextualizes the work of Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and others via art criticism, psychoanalysis, biography, queer theory, and historical document to honor writers, artists, and thinkers who sustain us when nothing else does.

Author Biography

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and six critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publication is the 2022 reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven; his seventh book, Poem Bitten by a Man, is forthcoming from Nightboat in the fall of 2023. His 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. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he's now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Author residence: Charlottesville, VA