Oct 5 2009 - Poet Brian Teare will read at Prairie Lights

Poet Brian Teare will read from "Sight Map," his new collection, in a free event at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5, in Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. in downtown Iowa City.

The event, co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, will be streamed live and archived on the Writing University Web site: http://writinguniversity.uiowa.edu/.

In "Sight Map" Teare blends the speculative poetics of the San Francisco Renaissance with a postconfessional candor to embody the "open field" tradition of such including Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan. Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.

Teare, who teaches at the California College of the Arts, is the author of the Brittingham Prize-winning "The Room Where I Was Born," as well as the forthcoming volume "Pleasure" and two chapbooks. He has received Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships.