The room where I was born / Brian Teare.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Teare, Brian.

Series:

Brittingham prize in poetry (Series)

The Brittingham prize in poetry

Language:

English

Physical Description:

x, 98 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, [2003]

Summary:

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. Following a trajectory from the bedrooms of childhood through the hotel rooms of adulthood, the book is a fable about desire, filtered through the losses and fractures of trauma. Its lush, sensual language is the life within violence where imagination resides. Though the poems are forms borne out of the intersection of violence and sexuality, they also affirm the tenderness and compassion necessary to give consciousness and identity sufficient meaning. The characters in these poems try to locate the possible meanings and effects of experience, and their language is the threshold over which the brutal crosses into the beautiful. This collection is an achievement of courage and vision.

Contents:

I

Circa 3

Rules for the Telling

First person plural is a house 11

Sleeping Beauty & the Prince: Self-portrait as Victim & Perpetrator 12

Poem between Line Breaks 14

Begin, Beware

I. Invocation 21

In the Library of the Fairy Tale 23

The Milk-Father 25

[Floating Poem] 27

II. The Tutelary Forest 28

In the Library of the Fairy Tale 29

The Aviary Hour 30

The room where I was born 32

Circa 33

Then We Were Raptured

Bad like 39

Marriage Elegy 40

"A Family Establishment" 42

Drowned Houses 43

Children's Songs 44

Touch 45

Then we were Raptured 46

Apiary 47

"Shirley Temples for the girls," 49

Dangerous Kitchen 50

II

Agoraphobia: A Reply 53

Set for a Southern Gothic

Because David & Jonathan 57

Trick Noir 60

Against Abstraction 62

Set for a Southern Gothic 63

Circa 67

The Word Cock & the Sublime

Detail from "Set for a Southern Gothic" 73

House in Summer with a Slapped Face in It 76

Tenement Body 77

The Word Cock & the Sublime 78

of a Sleeping Man, & a Second Man Awake 80

Toward Lost Letters

Circa 93.

Notes:

Inclides bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0299194000

0299194043

OCLC:

51898581