Brian Teare Biography
Born in Athens, Georgia, Brian Teare grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He received a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Alabama and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University in 2000. His collections of poetry include The Room Where I Was Born (2003), winner of the Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and Sight Map (2009).
Teare was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. A critic as well as a poet, his work has appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (2009). Teare lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he practices bookbinding and printing.
how a birch shirks its skins : strange
grain of the language of prayer : to disturb
words addressed to where God is is
what writing is : alphabet alive beneath
...
house of each sentence endlessly hinged, house of each phrase
opened elegy
entirely latches, exactly latches, hasps, proliferant, endlessly opened, of
doors,
...
Now the rain
Now the seams put in evening
Now the tree seeming shakes out
of felt unfolds cleanly
...
There is no word can hold a chord no analogy fits ear
forte, into eye
a stanza a piano inside it would stifle, would rife with
hands fitting felt to phoneme, syllables to hammers, signs
...
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12/16/2025 10:00:02 PM # 1.0.0
