The Room Where I Was Born (The Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

Rating:
Summary: A Talent for Over-writing
Review: Brian Teare's poetry has stunning music and this creates a haunting irony given the personal pain he describes. Individual lines have gorgeous aural effects, but the cumulation is often overwrought, overdone. The poems go on long after they end, as does the book. And as much as he enjoys flaunting his impressive linguistic prowess, he enjoys even more excavating his grief in as many words as possible. This is unsettling, to say the least. (Is he writing to release the demons or writing to show off how cleverly he can release the demons?) The poems could be cleaner and the book could be about twenty-odd pages shorter.

Rating:
Summary: a terrific book
Review: I can't recommend this book highly enough--for its ambition, its toughness, its beauty, its desperate passion. Given the harrowing and combustible histories informing this book's poems--whether a speaker's personal history of trauma or our fairy tales' archetypal violences--Teare brings an eye and ear and heart and mind which give lyrical account to these histories, rendering them into hallowed and brutal texts at the same time. Teare's book is a book of ferocious witness--but not just witness to a self's transformation into knowingness and difficult identity, but also witness to the necessary and finally saving difficulties of lyrical form which can turn experience into frightening, truthful art. This is a difficult book in content and form because it's dealing with the harshest of matters and has found, turn after turn, the genuine formal rescue that makes those matters complicatedly beautiful. This is a post-lapsarian dream-book, ledger-book, police-blotter, and song-book. It will be one of the smartest books you read this year--which is to say it will also be one of the most heartbreaking. Read this book!

Rating:
Summary: A Talent for Over-writing
Review: i don't typically enjoy collections of written poetry...for me, much of the nuance in a poem is conveyed through reading a piece or hearing it read. this book is an exception, though...the poems are meaningful, and they carry great emotional weight, and yet they are still accessible in their written form. the writing is abstract enough to keep the poems from being dully literal, and yet there are plenty of "hooks" which the reader can use to find personal meaning. this collection is highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: moving & meaningful, yet accessible
Review: i don't typically enjoy collections of written poetry...for me, much of the nuance in a poem is conveyed through reading a piece or hearing it read. this book is an exception, though...the poems are meaningful, and they carry great emotional weight, and yet they are still accessible in their written form. the writing is abstract enough to keep the poems from being dully literal, and yet there are plenty of "hooks" which the reader can use to find personal meaning. this collection is highly recommended!