Doomstead Days
Presented in partnership with the Center for Culture, History, and Environment and the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing, Brian Teare offers readers a new kind of nature poem—one that both anticipates and contributes to the renewal of public dialogue about environmental ethics and individual responsibility instigated by the UN’s recent report on climate change. Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: war- time days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.
Doors will open for this event at 6:30 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Seating will be by general admission.
Brian Teare
Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Fund for Poetry, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of five full-length books, The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-Award-winning Pleasure, Kingsley Tufts finalist Companion Grasses, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. He’s also published seven chapbooks, and is Associate Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.