In this Book
- Teeth Never Sleep: Poems
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: University of Arkansas Press
summary
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.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. i-vi
- Series Editors’ Preface
- pp. vii-viii
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Antipode II
- p. 9
- Teeth Never Sleep
- p. 12
- Dinner Time
- p. 13
- Rinconcito
- p. 15
- A Dog Poem
- p. 21
- II: Self-Portraits of a Man as Beast
- pp. 23-24
- Freeway Exits
- p. 26
- Meditations on Leaving
- pp. 40-43
- Spanish Midterm
- pp. 44-45
- Elegy for What Once Slept in a Cage
- pp. 46-52
- Conversations with My Father
- pp. 54-55
- Domestic Dispute
- p. 56
- Falling Asleep
- p. 58
- IV: Portraits of Beasts
- pp. 59-60
- Hombre-Lobo
- pp. 63-64
- Morning Breath
- p. 71
- Coming Home
- p. 73
- Quaker Oats
- p. 74
- Teeth Never Sleep II
- p. 75
- Meditations on Loss
- pp. 84-88
Additional Information
ISBN
9781610756471
Related ISBN(s)
9781682260739
MARC Record
OCLC
1048402342
Pages
70
Launched on MUSE
2018-08-23
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2018