Doomstead Days

Winner of the 2020 Four Quartets Prize
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Brian Teare offers a new kind of nature poem for the late Anthropocene in these plein air meditations on the pleasures and perils of everyday life during global 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: wartime 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.