The Daily Glance

Brian Teare's Pleasures ties everything together with a theme of gnosticism. It's rather odd because it's not looking at gnosticism as a historical practice but rather as a living embodiment, so the poems seem to replay the battle between body and idea. Teare pits body and word, and he tries to see how they are reconciled now.
His body not pastoral
Fragment--musculature
Suggests the word
Slur
Moreover, Teare turns one of the central biblical myths on an end. He mentions Adam and Eden, but his work is about Adam and Adam, and that makes it feel as if we are reading the work of an alternate sect.
Before theology became poetry,
science worked the garden
for a while, a shift in ideologies,
the gap between sacred
and secular widening until
the sacred fell of the map,
taking his skin away from me.
Tracing the themes through the book is fascinating, as is seeing Teare deal with loss through these gnostic themes.

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