Teeth Never Sleep (Cantomundo Poetry)
Drawing on folklore, fantasy, and childhood memory, this poetry collection examines the pressures of masculinity and the vulnerability beneath them. It traces the origins of violence and silence while sketching a self shaped by fragility.
Work Information
Poems that do not skirt the wound but enter it directly.
This short collection from a university press looks at the pressures of living as a man through family, love, and bodily experience. Sharp images accumulate in fragments and leave a strong afterimage.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Arkansas Pr
- Published
- 2018-10-19
- Pages
- 89 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 0.76 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781682260739
- ISBN-10
- 1682260739
- Price
- 10351 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/History & Criticism/Criticism & Theory
Finalist, 2019 PEN Open Book Award Winner, 2019 American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation Drawing on folklore and fantasy, childhood memory and hallucination, and marked by a tone of piercing divulgence, Teeth Never Sleep nimbly negotiates the split consciousness a culture of dominance requires of men (especially men of color), highlighting the fissures in selfhood created by the pressure to seek submission over intimacy while still wanting desperately to be loved, and tracing the contorted route by which emotional pain finds expression in violence. “The night my girlfriend tells my mother I beat her, / I feel betrayed. This was a secret we kept between us. / That night, I was no longer my mother’s loving son,” the speaker in one poem confesses, and later “I never wanted to be this kind of animal.” And yet, through the lens of Ángel García’s sharp imagining, men frequently appear as beasts (sometimes literally)—as hybrid beings both tender and brutal—that he steadfastly refuses to let off the hook as he obsessively catalogs the origins of toxic masculinity ( the first time I made my mother cry , the first time I pitied my father , the first time I saw a girl bleed ) and its quiet, lasting effects: “Still a part of me believes a / man shouldn’t cry in front of a woman, even in the dark.” In a culture of weaponized masculinity, the poems in Teeth Never Sleep make a doorway of a wound, inviting readers to walk through and sit down inside the raw pain they harbor to meditate on two central, urgent questions: what it means to be a man and how, as a man, to love.
Ángel García is the son of Mexican immigrants. Born in Texas and raised in Southern California, his work has been published in The American Poetry Review , Crab Orchard Review , Huizache , and others.
Reviews
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Daring poems that interrogate masculinity.
These poems are cuttingly lyrical. García incises a toxic legacy of inherited masculinity, both cultural and familial, and in the process he reveals the tender wound underneath. This is a risky collection, both thrilling and daring. I highly recommend it.