Poem Bitten By a Man by Brian Teare

Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award
Finalist for the 2024 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

Collaged from journals and notebooks kept during a period of chronic illness, economic precarity, and heartbreak, Poem Bitten By a Man captures crisis by cutting up the record of a queer life lived in devotion to poetry and visual art.

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the work of Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and others via art criticism, psychoanalysis, biography, queer theory, and historical document to honor writers, artists, and thinkers who sustain us when nothing else does.