Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of six critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. His most recent book, Doomstead Days, was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His honors include the Four Quartets Prize, Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the MacDowell Colony. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

“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 “Teare’s poetry can be traversed like a switchback staircase; the flight down the page is always manifold. . . The poems are buoyant to behold, like delicate gasps of breath, and the imagery is diaphanous, fuzzy, and sharp as a barely grasped dream.” —Terry Nguyen, Momus"I’m floored by [The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven's] formal bravery and structural accomplishments, moved so much by the travail of the body of B (as I’ve been calling it, in my mind)."—Dana Levin, The Adroit Journal“Learning to be with pain, Teare attempts to articulate in language that which is inexpressible, to work within a form that takes into account the rupture and repetition of illness… But I wonder, returning to the paintings themselves, if Martin’s desire to unlock the grid and undermine the square, if her frayed margins and stray lines don’t bear a similarity to Teare’s need to break open the lyric… Just as his experience of illness can’t be processed without outside reference (clinics, symptoms), his work — that is, his poems — is likewise involved in the world, a striking departure from Martin’s doctrine of inspiration (the work arrives premade to the waiting artist). Teare, however, emphasizes inextricability and interdependence.”—Interview with Jaime Shearn Coan in Jacket2, “Illness, Lyric, and Total Contingency”