The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven

by Brian Teare

The typographical experiments of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven make visible the hidden experience of chronic pain and illness. During uninsured and ineffectual medicalization, Teare turns to the work of writer and abstract artist Agnes Martin, which offers both counsel and consolation when diagnosis fails. Harnessing the power of the grid intrinsic in the typeset page, the resulting poems balance language and silence in visual fields that give shape to somatic knowledge. Rejecting bad care and the false promise of cure, this book reimagines what healing looks like.

112 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 19, 2022

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

[lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. One of the best collections of poems I’ve read in a long time. Teare’s text deals with his own chronically ill body and his difficulties navigating a for-profit, sterile, anonymized medical system; pain without diagnosis; the gap that always exists between his embodied experiences and what he can explain in a poem (the failure of the lyric, especially in relation to pain); and the paintings of Agnes Martin, meditative grids whose placid surfaces contain very small asymmetries, interruptions, dis-organizations. His poems are not always on-the-nose ekphrastic (i.e., not every poem responds to a painting through descriptive language), but always formally ekphrastic: he arranges sparse blocks of language in units, where they interlock and weave with one another while occupying specific quadrants of the square page. What I deeply admire about this text is that, while it tenderly commits to many modes of ekphrasis (direct response to the work; form that follows the form of the paintings; metaphors about the body constructed from language about Martin’s surfaces and materials), ekphrasis is a secondary engine that helps Teare construct a personal text about his chronically ill, undiagnosed body. The ekphrasis is so full—so sufficient—and yet the text’s final project reaches beyond it.

[Ivan Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is so masterful and had the honor of working with brian this summer..... also the additional interview questions, fantastic!