Teethmarks

by Sina Queyras

Teethmarks offers a cutting examination of contemporary society, from the personal to the global. The "fuzzy" simplicity of childhood at the book's outset is deftly shadowed by details of cigarette butts in the girl's room, the scent of burning leaves and teeth marks on Barbie dolls (From the dog, Terry assures her, when he was a puppy.) From there on in, Queyras embarks on a dynamic exploration of form in poems sharply aware of shifting boundaries, groundlessness, the seedy pastoral of childhood and the difficulty of maintaining community and family in our increasingly fragmented lives. Teeth Marks merges lives constructed by B-movies and the daily news, transposing their black-and-white "realities" with palettes of vital colour.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2004

About the author

Sina Queyras' last collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award, and she is the winner of the 2012 Friends of Literature Award. She is a blogger for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation's blog.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teethmarks is divided into four parts: "Jersey Fragments", "Dizzy, or, My Mother's Life as Cindy Sherman", "Eight Small Stones", and "Bridging & Tunnelling". The second part, "Dizzy, or, My Mother's Life as Cindy Sherman", is perhaps the most interesting for its examination of women and spectatorship (aptly summarized by a quote from John Berger: "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at."). Pay attention to the poems that include the phrase "can anyone see me?"...

from "Jersey Fragments"...

Blue jays pry the dawn.
Your blue eyes:
yesterday's worry melting.

Sappho I dream your thumbs
firm as fragments on my thighs.

Now the starlings pull
a tangled veil across the sky.

Amma pirouettes.
Even here the tea
is always cold.

In Jersey, cicadas
taunt pumpkins:
we are all avoiding.

- You Turn My Head, pg. 15

from "Dizzy, or, My Mother's Life as Cindy Sherman"...

all day

and potato salad spring

rubber tires

emaciated fox

cigarettes butts

and watermelon

If she could

(can anyone see me?)
hold this moment

he
and straps a pot roast
on the radiator

drives in circles

little legs and feet

mountains and cooked through.

Later in the clean sheets

throughout the house

buds everywhere at once.

- Good Woman Moment, pg. 52

*

packed nothing

she buys glasses, a new dress
new bra for the new
(there, cocktail, cigarette, how
her heel twists at the ankle)
shoes in years.

calves

and tingles

There is a woman sunhat
patio
unencumbered

or anyone. She will not

her skirt up and rubs

does not flinch

(can anybody see me?)

- Untitled Film Still #7, pg. 64

from "Eight Small Stones"...

The air is purple and smoky from piles of burning leaves. At the north end of the field a farmer stands by his tractor waving at her as she runs, and she's heard of trespassing and salt guns, which makes her run faster, tripping on the uneven earth below, hard chunks stubborn with woody stalks chopped by the steel of his plough. Where the pee has soaked into the denim, her thighs sting, and she knows that if she runs as fast as she can she might lift up and soar above the shifting driving her further. And it is not until she is in the centre of the field that she feels the heat in her runners, that she stops to take a breath, smells the melting rubber, the embers alive and smoking underfoot.

- Walking On Fire, pg. 73

from "Bridging & Tunnelling"...

The door blown open and Sappho steals in, sits
on the side of the bed where you are moaning,
alone, longing to be larger than yourself.

There is dust on your lines, she says,
dull wit cramps your damp bed. Crack
your spine: it's about desire, the triangulation of,

intensity of the other, not self, split in two. And
not just any other, be discerning. Condense yes,
but expand. And you're wishing she

were more butch than you. That
she would expand you right now. But
already she is only shadows. Somewhere

the A-train stops and she stirs aboard. She
knows you ride it daily. Knows you will
follow. Knows it's a matter of time.

- Eros, or Error, pg. 93