Peter O'Leary and Brian Teare

20 FEBRUARY 2011 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Peter O'Leary, Depth Theology, and Brian Teare, Pleasure, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

More about the readers
Peter O'Leary's most recent book of poems, his second, is Depth Theology, about which Andrew Joron opines, "Drawing poetic energy from the black deposits of the Text, O'Leary advances the gnostic effort of (re)constructing a hidden God. I know this book will be placed between the works of Baudelaire and Scholem in the universal library." O'Leary's first book of poems is Watchfulness; he has also published the critical book Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & The Poetry of Illness, and, acting as his literary executor, he has edited two collections of the late poet Ronald Johnson.

Brian Teare's new book of poems is Pleasure. Fanny Howe says of it, "The painful rip of the body away from from a state of erotic joy to one of stunned aloneness is here explored in a garden in which the poet is tempted by the gnostic vision of reality, because it is so cruelly true to his experience." His two previous books of poems are The Room Where I Was Born and Sight Map. He is also editor and publisher of Albion Press, which he calls a "micro-press," that has published, among other works, a chapbook of Peter O'Leary's. Among his honors are a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and fellowships from the NEA and the Ruth Lilly Foundation.