Poem Bitten by a Man
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.
Poetry
$9.99 – $18.95
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the work of Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and others via art criticism, psychoanalysis, biography, queer theory, and historical document to honor writers, artists, and thinkers who sustain us when nothing else does.
Praise
“In Poem Bitten by a Man, the colors brought forth by a healer in the wake of a migraine are put into conversation with the blue stripes of an Agnes Martin canvas; heartbreak is metabolized like the waxy mouthful bitten out of a Jasper Johns painting; queer art histories, riddled with holes, become a poet’s braille as he seeks out a tolerable place on the pain scale. This book is already a mainstay, a nexus of body and image and story and time that I’ll reach toward again and again.”
-Aisha Sabatini Sloan
“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.”
-Wayne Koestenbaum
“I’m always moved (and changed) by Brian Teare. It’s already a part of my mind what he makes and says this rich stark work affects me so deeply. Here to read means avidly copying into my notebook from his because what it is, this book, is heart and pain and the loosened materiality of all of it, the bodily records of his life and art and him copying thoughtfully from Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin everyone all pouring our secret public thoughts into so many cups, it’s dark & luminous reading this potion”
-Eileen Myles
“Ekphrasis involves voicing what art can’t speak. Teare’s expansive response to the art of Agnes Martin and Jasper Johns—touching on visionaries such as Ruth Asawa, Jay DeFeo, Sam Gillian as well—does this ever so differently. While probing the conditions allowing the artists to transmute biography and turn away from turmoil, he sounds out their findings, letting them undergird his bodily experience of precarity, illness, and queer love. Behold the poet’s gorgeous turn toward!”
-Mónica de la Torre
“Teare, struggling with illness, searches for lost balance through an intense engagement with the painting of Agnes Martin. These achingly beautiful poems demonstrate the ways that, as Dickinson puts it, ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes.'”
-Rae Armantrout
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Details
ISBN: 978-1-643-62210-1
Paperback, 108 pages, 8 x 9.5 in
Publication Date: September 26, 2023
Reviews
“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… This dazzling consideration of queer art and life will challenge and enlighten its readers.”
“The ‘structure of feeling’ that Teare’s book ‘leaves behind’ is of something poignant (partly due to its difficult subject matter—abuse, illness, hardship), but what remains is also an impression of clearness, and beauty. If this sounds like a description of a painting, that is to Teare’s credit.”
[Poem Bitten By A Man is] a hybrid book, both poetry and essay, as well as an attempt to press writing into and against visual art: to plunder a visual artist’s tactics, wherever instructive, and import them into a poetics. . . . The visual artists Teare circles around and returns to serve as guides and models for living, thinking, feeling, and making.
Brian Teare’s Poem Bitten by a Man feels unclassifiable. . . prose, poem, prose-poem, collage, illness memoir, ars poetica, art history queered into proper vision, treatise on the nature of labor, treatise on the nature of suffering—all are true. Many more are true. I want to make a simple claim. I find few things as genuinely enjoyable, as honestly useful, as endlessly revelatory, as watching a poet’s mind at work. This feels the primary gift of Teare’s newest book—a kind of echo accompaniment of his lovely, and recently reissued, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (please, buy it too, and read them together), his poetic correspondence/collaboration with the work of Agnes Martin. Here, Jasper Johns is part of the conversation, as are many others.
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