Our stories are written and reflected in our bodies. Our DNA, our memories, and our somatic experiences are a setting as vital as the external world through which we navigate. In Cree poet Dallas Hunt’s second collection Teeth, the titular body parts are pieces of autobiography that erupt from those places of culture, politics, and land. The result is a series of poems that are intimate and incisive, contending with the world with vivid insights that call to mind a line in “The Furnace,” where Hunt reminds the reader that “teeth is a verb.”
The world that Hunt creates in Teeth reflects this interplay of the personal and external. It is comprised of parts and particles, an image repeated throughout the poems – particles get stuck in the gumline just as frequently as particles comprise the universe. The effect is refreshingly cohesive; while the subjects of the poems flow as diffusely as the particles themselves. The collection is also brought together into three sections, each marked by illustrations of and poems about ankwaca (squirrel), miscanikwacas (gopher), and kaskitew maskwa (black bear). This structure helps remind the reader of the interconnectedness of the minuscule – overlooked, and integral –with the largeness of the universe, grief and time.
The dualities of large and small are woven with a keen eye on the fragility and ephemerality of life. In “Green K,” Hunt writes “everyone is / so small / frail yet somehow / blossoming.” Hunt continuously emphasizes the possibilities contained even within fragile, nascent, and vulnerable states. The poetic voices throughout the collection maintain this awareness of size and fragility, even in moments of humor, such as when Hunt shares the story of an unfortunate miscanikwacas and its abject run-in with the human world. Frustrations with settler colonialism. The limits of expectation and “legibility” in Indigenous literatures and Marxist alienation are also expressed in moments of reflection, irony, and complexity, whether traversing a polluted prairie or standing in line at a checkout.
Hunt’s strong metaphors offer surprising and stark imagery that underpin the emotional depth of the collection. Poems like “Notes on Grief” offer a series of metaphors where grief opens each stanza. Grief is presented as a house, a cineplex, and all the fixtures of a condo, among other things – it is something that is housed, that breaks, that is a structure unto itself. The steadiness of these metaphors collapses within the poems and also provides tension when they reappear later in the collection, like in “My Kôhkom Was A Sentence,” where Hunt writes about grief as “a meteor / a muddy shed / a shovel full of piss.” Large and small objects are tied back into grief with the deeply and unexpectedly physical. There is a beauty in these images that strikes the reader with their own sense of uncanny: they are unexpected but familiar.
Teeth is a collection that reminds you that, as Hunt writes, “you find worlds / in people.” Pieces of everyday life like reality television, a soccer ball, a grocery store become juxtaposed with larger themes of loss, extractive capitalism and survival. The particles are present, and the poetry is its own complex, vital and illuminating world.
TEETH can be purchased at: https://
nightwoodeditions.com/ products/9780889714526
