Teeth: Poems

This is a book about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.

Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.

Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”

Dallas Hunt’s Teeth is a gorgeously spare collection of anticolonial incisor poems. It bit me open with its consideration of axe-father chopping kindling-offspring, Edward Curtis’s photographic dysgraphia, grief and recovery, tender identification with the heels of WWE, prairie haunted/harmed by resource extraction, and a profound love of plant, human, and animal kin.

There’s a certain afternoon light that can turn an untouched glass of water or bare alder branches or a cousin’s shrug into memory and hereafter at once. That’s what reading Dallas Hunt’s Teeth feels like. It is delicate, expansive, and combustible. Under Hunt’s exquisite gaze, colonial systems are pulled apart and discarded. The land and our bodies take a beating, fracture and heal, and laugh when it’s most needed. If love is going to conquer all, it will do so through these poems.