The Room Where I Was Born

by Brian Teare

An architecture equally poetry, fairy-tale, autobiography, and fiction, The Room Where I Was Born rebuilds the house of the lyric from fragments salvaged from experience and literature. Though the poems are borne out of the intersection of violence and sexuality, they also affirm the tenderness and compassion necessary to give consciousness and identity sufficient meaning. Its language the threshold over which the brutal crosses into the beautiful, this collection is an achievement of courage and vision.

Genres: Poetry, Gay, LGBT

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2003

About the author

A former National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fund for Poetry, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-award winning Pleasure, the Kingsley Tufts finalist Companion Grasses, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and National Book Award longlisted Doomstead Days. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he is an Associate Professor at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Reviews

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

gut punch.

[Bea Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting and beautiful, Brian Teare's language and rhythm in this book about his childhood builds momentum to the height of fear. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

[Katie McCleary · Rating 5 out of 5]

heartbreaking and gorgeous poetry.

[Rebecca Valley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the early, more fairytale like sections of this book best, but appreciated the biblical depictions of gay romance, the appearance of many varied and horrifying rooms, the way trauma flashed in and out even in moments of love. My only qualm was with some confusion around who the narrator was in certain sections, and the seemingly arbitrary numbering of some passages.

[Sps · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't one of those poetry books that cloaks riddles in enigmas or tries to be sparse and spare so you fill in the good bits on your own. If anything, it's baroque, too much. Too much Bruno Bettelheim, too much reliance on linguistic terms as metaphors for for other things, too many thesaurus words, too many em dashes.

But the careful weighting and echoing of words is there. It sounds well. The best poem is the one that led me to the book, "The Word Cock & the Sublime," and the book is entirely worth finding just for that.

[Nikki · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is written from three (autobiographical) perspectives - those of a young male victim of incest, young girls, and a male prostitute in the South. Interesting... but this writing is THICK and full of metaphor, overly descriptive. That I find boring, but that's just me.