Doomstead Days

WINNER of the 2020 FOUR QUARTETS PRIZE LONGLISTED for the 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN POETRY FINALIST for the the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST for the KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARD Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specificpoems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: wartime days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.

About the Author :
Brian Teare is the author of six critically acclaimed books, most recently Doomstead Days, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and Companion Grasses, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. His honors include a Lambda Literary Award and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. An Associate Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Review :
"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 "[A] lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve." —John Fiege, Chrysalis Poets "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 "In Doomstead Days, the celebratory and the harrowing, the healing and the violent, the fertile and the impotent are 'equal all.' To say that Teare’s poems reside inside—and embody—bewildering equations is to pinpoint one of the ways he allows you to re-experience the world—to see everything anew…"—Page Hill Starzinger, On the Seawall "How do we live among the wreckage of what’s been spilled? Syllables hum with the felt sense of the poet, whose sweat wets the notebook as he walks. Teare has composed lyrics as formally meticulous and sonically aware as they are expansive, pleasurable, and unforgettable."—Oliver Baez Bendorf, Kenyon Review "Teare’s poetry matters for the depth of what it can bring to sensual life. Readers will be grateful to encounter our neurotic, medication-swollen, late-capitalist mess of an era alongside a sensibility so evocative and intense."—Jay Aquinas Thompson, Full Stop "Given the havoc of climate crisis around the world, Doomstead Days is an all too timely book. While its title may invoke a sense of doom, Teare’s poems accurately report what he finds on his walks, and yet at the same time inspire us to act with tenderness.—John Bradley, Rain Taxi "You can bet a Teare poem is gonna be about one of three things: reading, walking, or fucking. A poetry of encounters: page, world, partner."—Devin King, Fence Digital "Teare suggests that if there’s hope, it lies in attunement to the fluid gender of the Anthropocene phenomenological world and in unconventional—queer—ways of loving the world’s flesh. Attentive walking in our inescapably impure surroundings may help cultivate both."—Lynn Keller, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars "Composed of eight long poems, Doomstead Days is rooted, for the most part, in walking excursions through both natural and built environments…The length and formal intricacy of many of these poems engenders a discursive lyric that is sometimes diaristic, at other times documentary."—Ben Rutherfurd, Under a Warm Green Linden "Teare’s poems explore the toxicity and slow violence of environmental degradation across vast spatial and temporal reaches, using both wide-angle and microscopic lenses. They deal with landscapes and watersheds, histories and statistics, but they also present sensory images gathered through bodily encounters—the crush of pine needles, burning thighs, sticky resin, wind. His lyrics unspool in ambulatory fashion, employing syllabics to create a pedestrian rhythm as their lines trail over the extra-wide pages. Some carve a river across the blankness; others stream downward in long, thin strips."—Marie Scarles, The Believer "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