Description
Book SynopsisA timely reissue, 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.
This edition includes a new interview with the author by the poet and scholar Declan Gould!
Trade Review“The poems feel solitary but intimate: Teare’s voices let us weigh the insoluble questions of how to live as an ethical being in the face of violence and environmental collapse.”—
Tess Taylor, The New York Times "I’m floored by [The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven's] formal bravery and structural accomplishments, moved so much by the travail of the body of B (as I’ve been calling it, in my mind)."—Dana Levin, The Adroit Journal
“Learning to be with pain, Teare attempts to articulate in language that which is inexpressible, to work within a form that takes into account the rupture and repetition of illness… But I wonder, returning to the paintings themselves, if Martin’s desire to unlock the grid and undermine the square, if her frayed margins and stray lines don’t bear a similarity to Teare’s need to break open the lyric… Just as his experience of illness can’t be processed without outside reference (clinics, symptoms), his work — that is, his poems — is likewise involved in the world, a striking departure from Martin’s doctrine of inspiration (the work arrives premade to the waiting artist). Teare, however, emphasizes inextricability and interdependence.”—Interview with Jaime Shearn Coan in Jacket2, “Illness, Lyric, and Total Contingency”
