Poem Bitten by a Man – Brian Teare

Winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the PSA

Finalist for the 2024 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

Five poems from Poem Bitten by a Man at Brooklyn Rail

A Conversation with Dana Levin at Adroit Journal

Interview with Dante Silva of Nightboat Books

“Brian Teare’s surprising, engrossing Poem Bitten by a Man concerns many things, and the intersections between those things: The chronically ill body, its troubles, pain, and attempts to heal. A love affair and its demise. The artists Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin, their personalities and obsessions and inspiration, their lives in art and in America. Caregiving and receiving. Late-stage capitalism. Queerness. Whiteness. Being from and leaving the South. Teare has found a way, in this complicated, indefatigable, entertaining, fascinating collage of notebook fragments, quotations, verse lines, and prose paragraphs, to get so much of life and its connected, disconnected events all together while resisting any urge to sanitize its messes, normalize its ambitions and longings, or attempt falsely to assuage the reality of trouble and toil and pain. Theoretical without being esoteric, uncompromising and also uncertain, thoughtful about economic, artistic, and physical realities, resolutely inconclusive and full of ideas, Poem Bitten by a Man is a marvelous book that tells a story even as the story it tells continually falls apart.” – Daisy Fried, citation for the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award

“Teare’s method of collaging—his reading and obsessions, his collected biographies alongside his own intimate, old notebooks—creates an ecology of references and experiences that readers can enter and ultimately share. With this empathetic exchange, abstraction, in art and poetry, can be a mode of conveying feeling, for making felt what seems unrepresentable or unsayable. It can transubstantiate feeling into form or tonally color the expression of a thought. It can become a technique for jumping bodies.” – John Vincler, for the Poetry Foundation

“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…Ultimately, it is “not perfection/ but the inevitable/ form of the idea” that Teare seeks. This dazzling consideration of queer art and life will challenge and enlighten its readers.” – Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review

“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.” –Janani Ambikapathy, for Harriet Books

“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