ABOUT THIS BOOK

An architecture equally poetry, fairy-tale, autobiography, and fiction, The Room Where I Was Born rebuilds the house of the lyric from fragments salvaged from experience and literature. Though the poems are borne out of the intersection of violence and sexuality, they also affirm the tenderness and compassion necessary to give consciousness and identity sufficient meaning. Its language the threshold over which the brutal crosses into the beautiful, this collection is an achievement of courage and vision.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Brian Teare is a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and Colorado Review. This is his first book.

REVIEWS

"Brian Teare's poetry is turning the lyric on its ear, along with the Southern Gothic, the fairy tale, the Old Testament—anything that gets in the way of his powerful voice gets pulled in, chewed up, spit out as a new and frightening (and sexy!) utterance. No one is safe in any of these poems, in any sense of the word. What a brave new voice, livid and gutsy and fresh."—D. A. Powell, author of Tea and Lunch

"Precious few first books possess the range, ambition, and erudition of Brian Teare's. Yet Teare's formidable intelligence always derives from emotional necessity, from an urgency of feeling and a sure command of song which allow him to meet with courage subjects that are sometimes harrowing, sometimes sublime. The Room Where I Was Born is a remarkable debut."—David Wojahn, author of Spirit Cabinet

"In some poetry you feel there is too little lived experience—here you feel there is almost more than you can take in: you must both let the lines carry you swiftly, as they do, and read them slowly, for all they give you to ponder. For all their differences—and they are almost night and day—I would place this book next to the coming-of-age classic Housekeeping, for its deep, eerie beauty."—Jean Valentine, author of Cradle of the Real Life

TABLE OF CONTENTS

<table of contents, p. vii>
Table of Contents
I
Circa									000
Rules for the Telling
Rules for the Telling								000
First person plural is a house							000
Sleeping Beauty & the Prince: Self-portrait as Victim & Perpetrator	000
Poem Between Line Breaks							000
Begin, Beware--
	I. Invocation									000
 In the Library of the Fairy Tale,						000
 The Milk-Father								000
				[ The Floating Poem ]
	II. The Tutelary Forest							000
	In the Library of the Fairy Tale,						000
	The Aviary Hour								000
				The room where I was born				000
Circa									000
Then We Were Raptured
			
	Bad like									000
	Marriage Elegy								000
	"A Family Establishment"--							000
	Drowned Houses								000
	Children's Songs								000
	Touch										000
	Then we were Raptured.							000
	Apiary										000
	"Shirley Temples for the girls,"						000
	Dangerous Kitchen								000
II
	Agoraphobia: A Reply							000
Set for a Southern Gothic
	Because David & Jonathan							000
	Trick Noir									000
	Against Abstraction								000
	Set for a Southern Gothic							000
Circa									000
The Word Cock & the Sublime
	Detail from "Set for a Southern Gothic"					000
	House in Summer with a Slapped Face in It					000
	Tenement Body								000
	The Word Cock & the Sublime						000
	--of a Sleeping Man, & a Second Man Awake				000
Toward Lost Letters
	Toward Lost Letters								000
Circa									000
Notes										000
 

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

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