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Brian Teare & Dana Levin – Night of Poetry & Discussion
September 11, 2023 @ 6:00 pm
This reading will be held in-person at Left Bank Books.
Left Bank Books and Saint Louis Poetry Center present critically acclaimed poets Brian Teare & Dana Levin, who will discuss themes from their newest books, focusing on transforming oppressions of body and family—chronic illness and abusive family environments.
EVENT INFO
In-person and virtual event.
RSVP encouraged here.
Books available from Left Bank Books.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
POEM BITTEN BY A MAN
Brian Teare
A medical emergency, a road trip, a breakup, and a paean to the power of creative process– Poem Bitten by a Man is for everyone who has tried against the odds to make a life in art, whether they succeeded or not. Using somatic language captured through a notebook practice, Teare recontextualizes the work of Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and others via art criticism, psychoanalysis, biography, queer theory, and historical document to honor writers, artists, and thinkers who sustain us when nothing else does.
NOW DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE
Dana Levin
Written between 2016 and 2020, Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how great change calls the soul out “to be a messenger—to record whatever wanted to stream through.” Levin works in a variety of forms, calling on beloveds and ancestors, great thinkers and religions—convened by her own spun-of-light wisdom and intellectual hospitality. Balancing clear-eyed forensics of the past with vatic knowledge of the future, Levin writes: “So many bodies a soul has to press through: personal, familial, regional, national, global, planetary, cosmic— // ‘Now do you know where you are?’”
ABOUT THE POETS
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, BRIAN TEARE is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man. An Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
DANA LEVIN is the author of five books poetry. Her latest is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press), a 2022 New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” Other books include Banana Palace (2016) and Sky Burial (2011), which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Recent poems and essays have appeared in Poem-a-day, Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other publications. She is a grateful recipient of many honors, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, and the Library of Congress, as well as from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. With Adele Elise Williams, she co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master (2023) for the Unsung Masters Series. Levin serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
