Doomstead Days

The poems feel solitary but intimate: Teare's voices let us weigh the insoluble questions of how to live as an ethical being in the face of violence and environmental collapse. -Tess Taylor, The New York Times An experience where the binary between world and body dissolves almost completely -Trevor Ketner, Lambda Literary A nature that he sees with rare precision, humor, and depth -David Bergman, Kenyon Review The disaster is alive again, a propellant rhythm that cannot be stopped from cascading down the page -Andrew Seguin, Colorado Review Doomstead Days is a book very much engaged in the large canvas, experimenting with short lines and short sections across expansive sequences -rob mclennan,rob mclennan's blog Gorgeously constructed, the poems of Brian Teare's Doomstead Days braid breathtaking leaps of narrative with lyric disjunction, grounding them in a music that goes anywhere it wants but never ceases to stay the course or soothe the ear. While Thoreau sauntered, this poet hikes America's 'protected' yet poisoned lands, wades through urban asphalt runoff, stands at the end of coastal and human health-all while measuring our out-of-whack habitat with the care and accuracy of a land surveyer. Equipped with a moral vision, keen observational powers, and his flawless ear, Teare's walking thinks itself toward new ground in our hurt world. How Teare manages to tell the complicated history of our complicity with such generosity, compassion, and love is a mystery. Doomstead Days, as expansive as it is damning, is both a triumph and a cry. It may just be the field guide to our future. -Gillian Conoley Near the end of this beautiful, various, terrifying book we meet the Anthropocene with its singular wide sex and it is, in Brian Teare's description, 'biospheric,' implying that it's all of us, just as God or God's monster is all of us. And from the streets and toxic rivers of Philadelphia to the green of Vermont, Doomstead Days details that all, with sustained and sustaining attention to our desires and failures to get across, to depart, to cross over-via image, via thought, via motion-into knowledge itself, to be 'married to the world // alive with the feel / of mortal knowledge.' And Brian Teare, at the very end of things, cautions us that 'the world is awake'; and that 'it is the gender / that remembers everything.' Read and remember this book. -C.S. Giscombe With a lyric that is precise without merely operating, Brian Teare restores to the reader the dark startle of our own complicity in the fouled world, while also acknowledging the desire 'to go on wanting / to catch the rhythm // of being open, / critical, & also glad.' The poems of Doomstead Days have not been made in despair, but through it. With them, we are joined together, and continue. -Joan Naviyuk Kane