Charles Jensen | Writer

Brian Teare’s first collection was recommended to me by one of my MFA teachers who knew him.

There are two overwhelming impulses in the way the poems are crafted: sound and form.

Brian is a poet who creates forms anew when he writes. He pushes the boundary of form and calls into question whether form is a limitation or a liberation. It is difficult to walk that line, but he does it in almost every piece in this book and even further in his second book Sight Map.

The Room Where I Was Born is a dark book. There is something sinister lurking just past where the shadows being, and night is falling or just about to fall. The world of the poems is highly sensualized and sexualized, full of curious power dynamics. The form and the sound reinforce this.

It is a book that reinvented poetry for me.