The Dagger Between Her Teeth

by Jennifer LoveGrove

Skulls and poetic piracy. Burning barns, drunken Christmases, scars, hospitals, serial killers, and, eventually, the possibilities of self-preservation and hope. The Dagger Between Her Teeth is Jennifer LoveGrove’s bloodthirsty debut. Powerfully topical, it's a rare collection of poetry ― one that confronts notions of violence, both physical and emotional, by focusing on a woman’s strength of will and capacity for ferocity. In The Dagger Between Her Teeth, LoveGrove resurrects and reinvents the dramatic young lives of two eighteenth-century corsairs, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Alive with the golden age of piracy but infused with the pulse of now, these poems shed more blood than a Tarantino flick. LoveGrove’s work provokes with theatrical plundering, creative cross-dressing, and vicious “Disdain reddens my blood ― I / know well I killed / my own husband and took / his clothes to be out here.” Still other poems examine the conflicting mythologies of Lilith, Adam's first wife, who was evicted from Eden for her sexual aggression. Disputed and co-opted, Lilith has been blamed for a vast array of “deviance,” as well as for miscarriages, wet dreams, nightmares in children, and lustful women ― these poems explore the more ominous elements of her mythology. But there is also a part of The Dagger Between Her Teeth that is informed by more personal experience, from disrupted family dynamics to the failure of “You’re not as fragile as you think you are; / I know you didn’t snap / any of those feathered necks / yourself. It’s all just tapeloops / and backward masking, take-out / wings and old Talking Heads albums.“

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Jennifer LoveGrove’s newest book is the poetry collection The Tinder Sonnets (April 2026, Book*hug Press). Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes, published in spring 2017, was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her novel Watch How We Walk was longlisted for the Giller Prize. She has two other poetry collections: I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario.