Stegner Fellow Reading - Brian Teare & Adam Johnson

"The Room Where I Was Born" (The Brittingham Prize in Poetry) by Brian Teare

An architecture equally poetry, fairy-tale, autobiography, and fiction, The Room Where I Was Born rebuilds the house of the lyric from fragments salvaged from experience and literature. Though the poems are borne out of the intersection of violence and sexuality, they also affirm the tenderness and compassion necessary to give consciousness and identity sufficient meaning. Its language the threshold over which the brutal crosses into the beautiful, this collection is an achievement of courage and vision.

"Parasites Like Us" by Adam Johnson

As the North American culture ends and the only study is that of humanity, Dr. Hank Hannah, a tenured anthropology professor who's coasting along at the University of Southeastern South Dakota after publishing The Depletionists, about the prehistoric Clovis people, leaves this book as a record for future colleagues. Having contended that the Clovis' sharpened spear points were responsible for eradicating 35 species, Hannah is drawn to the site at which his grad student Eggers finds a Clovis point, and grad student Trudy makes a spear of it. Their testing of the point on a 4-H hog helps land Hannah in a cushy federal prison, leaving the excavation site not properly protected, a situation that soon proves disastrous for all civilization except dogs and a few strangely protected humans. Yet though individuals and species die, the need for human connectedness remains strong. Johnson displays the same inventiveness, black humor, and penetrating insight that marked his short story collection.