Brian Teare

press release: 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.