Teeth & Teeth

Winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize The poems in Teeth & Teeth risk simplicity-of the line, of language, and ultimately of desire. Language here is not fantastical or flexed, but quiet and intentional, precise-language is allowed to feel, to labor, to pulse. Because of this, the poems' momentous hunger, anger, desire-the poems' "teeth" if you will-are urgently and deceivingly near. As in "Desire Diary," the desire is imperfect and inexplicable, a machine, even: Inside the mechanism, everyone / was handsome. Everyone / Came at it with a strange green / sound leaking from their / Lips. The momentum of desire in Teeth & Teeth-for a mother, a memory, a lover, a knowing, a world-is palpable and fast.>"Grief creates its own fire," writes Reagler in "Re-Routed," part of a collection devastating and warm, dazzling, clarifying, unpredictable, and which feels inevitable. What sustenance there is in finding language that speaks of inadequacy as a beginning and of faith as faith's absence. Through the poems we inhabit the void, our efforts to fill it, and affirm desire as unexpected fulfillment in itself.>Robin Reagler's Teeth & Teeth is a wild-mouthed dispatch from the cities of mourning we all inhabit, a desperate love letter to the waiting selves which grow out of exile from normalcy. In the face of the wearing down of the body, despite loss, these poems demand gratitude for the fierce habits of the living. -Ching-In Chen