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Milk Teeth
Milk Teeth is a highly original debut volume of poetry by the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Prize winner. It interrogates notions of category, including but not limited to gender. Rae White has produced poetry that is playful and edgy yet, at the same time, accessible and meaningful. It is a wise, adventurous and provocative collection that announces the arrival of a significant new talent in Australian poetry.
104 pages, Paperback
First published August 29, 2018
3 people are currently reading
204 people want to read
About the author
Rae White
7 books42 followersRae White is a non-binary transgender writer, educator and zine maker. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth (University of Queensland Press) won 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and commended in the 2018 Anne Elder Award.
Rae’s second poetry collection Exactly As I Am will be published by UQP in July 2022.
Rae is the editor of #EnbyLife, a journal for non-binary and gender diverse creatives. They are the Events and Marketing Manager at Queensland Poetry.
Rae’s second poetry collection Exactly As I Am will be published by UQP in July 2022.
Rae is the editor of #EnbyLife, a journal for non-binary and gender diverse creatives. They are the Events and Marketing Manager at Queensland Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
May 20, 2025
Modern poetry really just isn't for me. I've got a lot of queer poetry from my library, and it's just... yeah. I don't know why we're attempting to wax poetry about plucking pubic hair and turning it into blankets, but that's just me.
August 30, 2018
Another brilliant addition to the UQP publications of the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Recent winners being Stuart Barnes (‘Glasshouses’) & Shastra Deo (‘The Agonist’).
Covering a range of territory from the natural world, house plants, love & sensual pleasures as well as stark reminders about issues facing non binary people.
The breadth of young Aussie poetry right now is amazing.
Covering a range of territory from the natural world, house plants, love & sensual pleasures as well as stark reminders about issues facing non binary people.
The breadth of young Aussie poetry right now is amazing.
September 29, 2018
Rae is one of my close friends, so you may think this is biased. I have been buying and reading poems by Rae for a while and was even asked to do art for one of their pieces which was fantastic.
This collection includes one of my favourites, about a lavender plant and what it is thinking. It was nice to read poems with alternate pronouns in use.
My favourite poems were obviously about gender, because, well, it's me. I also liked 'spell for epiphanies', 'distant voices', 'sketches of insomnia', 'the ghost in your air-con' and I'm going to stop there before this list gets too long.
Rae brings together situations that may seem mundane or ordinary, or settings and items that seem like this, and looks at them from a different angle.
This collection includes one of my favourites, about a lavender plant and what it is thinking. It was nice to read poems with alternate pronouns in use.
My favourite poems were obviously about gender, because, well, it's me. I also liked 'spell for epiphanies', 'distant voices', 'sketches of insomnia', 'the ghost in your air-con' and I'm going to stop there before this list gets too long.
Rae brings together situations that may seem mundane or ordinary, or settings and items that seem like this, and looks at them from a different angle.
September 20, 2020
Note to remember my favourite poems from this collection:
Mother’s milk
Abandoned greenhouse
diary of a lavender plant
Mother’s milk
Abandoned greenhouse
diary of a lavender plant
June 16, 2019
This is poetry to savour, to revisit and engage with. White brings wit, skill and insight into their perspective of identity, nature, loss, and the power of language.
There is a seriousness infusing the quirkiness and tenderness within these poems, cleverly portrayed in the formatting, the topics, the range of viewpoints, the animals, and even the presence of the plants. Highly recommended.
There is a seriousness infusing the quirkiness and tenderness within these poems, cleverly portrayed in the formatting, the topics, the range of viewpoints, the animals, and even the presence of the plants. Highly recommended.
November 23, 2018
"and what's poetry for anyway?" (39).
I was lucky enough to meet Rae at the National Young Writer's Festival this year and purchase a copy of their book which they also signed for me. They're potentially one of the nicest writers I've encountered even as I blabbered a bit, my anxiety around meeting new and inspiring people hanging in the air.
I was taken by the gorgeous cover, and connected it to another collection I'd read by Sarah Holland-Batt. The winner of the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, White is more than deserving as their debut collection demonstrates variation and playfulness in all its language.
The collection is divided into sections that each follow a different element of life; the struggles of gender, love, loss. Each word is used delicately in its place and you watch as White experiments with style - you will have to flip the book around - and devises.
"delete every picture of
yourself
ever taken.
take snaps of the
cat: curled angles &
sprinkled sunlight (perfect)
#CatsofInstagram
#LoveMyCat 80 likes
self-love
can wait" (33).
White offers snippets of reality to their readers and reminds them of the daily decisions made for safety and comfort. Self-care and identity are transformed through the collection. What struck me was the little bits of humour throughout, in poems like "reading your suspension" (27) that explore the difficulties of being trans.
As the collection progressed I found myself engaging more with the poems. My favourite sections IV and V presenting to readers elements of tenderness and natural imagery that reminded me of the kind of poetry that I like to write. White is able to flow between softness and harsh language with their writing, adapting to any possibility. In particular, "diary of a lavender plant" stood out among the collection.
"I press her
between folds of wildflower books & sing
timidly of the moon as she sleeps" (65).
(Also there were bees in section V, which is always a winner for me).
"Milk Teeth" is a stunning collection of poems that play with the boundaries and changes of language that we are currently exploring today. Exploring gender, love, identity and change, White is definitely a voice to be watched as they continue their writing and create more beautiful and intriguing pieces. A real honour to have met them, and a real honour to be able to read and share this collection with friends.
(Note: GoodReads isn't letting me format the poems the way that they are within the text, so when you get to reading it, enjoy the beautiful surprise enjambment!)
I was lucky enough to meet Rae at the National Young Writer's Festival this year and purchase a copy of their book which they also signed for me. They're potentially one of the nicest writers I've encountered even as I blabbered a bit, my anxiety around meeting new and inspiring people hanging in the air.
I was taken by the gorgeous cover, and connected it to another collection I'd read by Sarah Holland-Batt. The winner of the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, White is more than deserving as their debut collection demonstrates variation and playfulness in all its language.
The collection is divided into sections that each follow a different element of life; the struggles of gender, love, loss. Each word is used delicately in its place and you watch as White experiments with style - you will have to flip the book around - and devises.
"delete every picture of
yourself
ever taken.
take snaps of the
cat: curled angles &
sprinkled sunlight (perfect)
#CatsofInstagram
#LoveMyCat 80 likes
self-love
can wait" (33).
White offers snippets of reality to their readers and reminds them of the daily decisions made for safety and comfort. Self-care and identity are transformed through the collection. What struck me was the little bits of humour throughout, in poems like "reading your suspension" (27) that explore the difficulties of being trans.
As the collection progressed I found myself engaging more with the poems. My favourite sections IV and V presenting to readers elements of tenderness and natural imagery that reminded me of the kind of poetry that I like to write. White is able to flow between softness and harsh language with their writing, adapting to any possibility. In particular, "diary of a lavender plant" stood out among the collection.
"I press her
between folds of wildflower books & sing
timidly of the moon as she sleeps" (65).
(Also there were bees in section V, which is always a winner for me).
"Milk Teeth" is a stunning collection of poems that play with the boundaries and changes of language that we are currently exploring today. Exploring gender, love, identity and change, White is definitely a voice to be watched as they continue their writing and create more beautiful and intriguing pieces. A real honour to have met them, and a real honour to be able to read and share this collection with friends.
(Note: GoodReads isn't letting me format the poems the way that they are within the text, so when you get to reading it, enjoy the beautiful surprise enjambment!)
March 12, 2024
i don't think this was bad i just don't think it was for me. i keep reading poetry to try and foster my taste for poetry and many times i just find myself confused with poetic abstractness. there were pages i liked tho
April 23, 2025
4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ White’s use of line breaks really shine in this collection. And by that I mean that the pages were made to work beyond just a typical space break by having you view poems in landscape, in columns, and in parts. I fell in love with the alliteration. Great poems!
July 6, 2020
Amazing, everyone definitely should read! Rae has such a way with words!
August 14, 2024
Rich, keening, and hopeful.
I am definitely the exact target audience for this one haha and as such, it felt very resonant.
The structure of this collection is brilliant. White has a very distinctive style, with a lot of tab spaces and "[noun]-[past tense verb]" collations, and all uses of the word "and" are stylised as an ampersand. Some of this does get to feeling a bit gimmicky after you've seen it again and again; possibly White's poetry is more technically impactful in isolation. But reading it this way enables you to experience more of an emotional journey.
The notes section was a bit unusual in that it stated what a bunch of the poems were about and I was like ☝️🤓 um actually i thought it was about something else ahaha So There.
Anyway: the epigraphs were fantastic.
As with all collections, some poems were better than others, but overall I can't give this any fewer than five stars because it just felt overwhelmingly sincere, and I value that.
I am definitely the exact target audience for this one haha and as such, it felt very resonant.
The structure of this collection is brilliant. White has a very distinctive style, with a lot of tab spaces and "[noun]-[past tense verb]" collations, and all uses of the word "and" are stylised as an ampersand. Some of this does get to feeling a bit gimmicky after you've seen it again and again; possibly White's poetry is more technically impactful in isolation. But reading it this way enables you to experience more of an emotional journey.
The notes section was a bit unusual in that it stated what a bunch of the poems were about and I was like ☝️🤓 um actually i thought it was about something else ahaha So There.
Anyway: the epigraphs were fantastic.
As with all collections, some poems were better than others, but overall I can't give this any fewer than five stars because it just felt overwhelmingly sincere, and I value that.
March 2, 2025
Another poetry book I wish I could give a 10/5 stars if I could.
Favorite poems from each part and analysis of them: part one is a tie between "tweets i never published" and "Dear Excited To Meet Me", the former being a break-up poem, and, upon second glance, the speaker's resentment of their lack of independence, and the latter being a uniquely formatted poem about a person deliberately falling for an internet scammer who they know are an internet scammer, but they fall for the internet scammer anyway because of a deep well of loneliness in them. The latter poem, especially, is a heavily resonant poem for me. The poem I enjoyed most from the second part, focusing on nonbinary transness and nonbinary trans identity, had many excellent poems, but I particularly liked "gender options", a poem about invalidation experienced as a nonbinary trans person and how society, particularly most modern cisgender ones, lock you out of the norms for society, and it's sequel poem, "Regarding your suspension", a poem written from the point of view of either a cisgender person or a binary transgender transmedicalist, asking the person in "gender options" for increasingly invalidating and humiliating proofs to their "true" gender and if they're "really" nonbinary. These particular poems, when read together, form an accurate commentary on binary gendered society and medical, legal, and social gatekeeping. Favorite poem from part 3 is "sketches of insomnia", an astonishingly accurate portrait of obsessive compulsive disorder. Favorite poem from part 4 is both "Tender" for its intimacy and "Keyholes" for its portrayal of t4t kinky rough sex. Favorite poem from part 5 is a tie between "Plants my exes gave me", a portrait of failed relationships told in the symbolism of rotting plants, and "diary of a lavender plant", the story of a lavender plant's journey from love, compassion and care to neglect. Finally, the favorite poem in part 6 is "These decades", a three part poem that gives me nostalgia for my own dead grandmother.
Rae White has an immense talent for poetry, experimental form, and imagery. I hope they keep writing.
Favorite poems from each part and analysis of them: part one is a tie between "tweets i never published" and "Dear Excited To Meet Me", the former being a break-up poem, and, upon second glance, the speaker's resentment of their lack of independence, and the latter being a uniquely formatted poem about a person deliberately falling for an internet scammer who they know are an internet scammer, but they fall for the internet scammer anyway because of a deep well of loneliness in them. The latter poem, especially, is a heavily resonant poem for me. The poem I enjoyed most from the second part, focusing on nonbinary transness and nonbinary trans identity, had many excellent poems, but I particularly liked "gender options", a poem about invalidation experienced as a nonbinary trans person and how society, particularly most modern cisgender ones, lock you out of the norms for society, and it's sequel poem, "Regarding your suspension", a poem written from the point of view of either a cisgender person or a binary transgender transmedicalist, asking the person in "gender options" for increasingly invalidating and humiliating proofs to their "true" gender and if they're "really" nonbinary. These particular poems, when read together, form an accurate commentary on binary gendered society and medical, legal, and social gatekeeping. Favorite poem from part 3 is "sketches of insomnia", an astonishingly accurate portrait of obsessive compulsive disorder. Favorite poem from part 4 is both "Tender" for its intimacy and "Keyholes" for its portrayal of t4t kinky rough sex. Favorite poem from part 5 is a tie between "Plants my exes gave me", a portrait of failed relationships told in the symbolism of rotting plants, and "diary of a lavender plant", the story of a lavender plant's journey from love, compassion and care to neglect. Finally, the favorite poem in part 6 is "These decades", a three part poem that gives me nostalgia for my own dead grandmother.
Rae White has an immense talent for poetry, experimental form, and imagery. I hope they keep writing.
February 28, 2024
Absolutely stunning imagery throughout, very moving. I have spent a very pleasant morning with this collection, and will remember it fondly. I plan on checking out White’s other works. In short, this collection gave me Big Feelings™️.
The formatting was absolutely infuriating. I am of the firm opinion that you should not have to regularly rotate a book by 90 degrees in order to read it. Unfortunately, several poems were published formatted in such a way in order to fit on the page. I am also of the opinion that if something is written in columns that you should read one column first and then the next. Apparently this is a trend in current poetry, so I had better get used to it.
The formatting was absolutely infuriating. I am of the firm opinion that you should not have to regularly rotate a book by 90 degrees in order to read it. Unfortunately, several poems were published formatted in such a way in order to fit on the page. I am also of the opinion that if something is written in columns that you should read one column first and then the next. Apparently this is a trend in current poetry, so I had better get used to it.
May 30, 2022
Using inclusive language, and painting rich images in the reader's mind, Milk Teeth is an absolute joy. Rae White's ability to set scenes and convey emotion is superb, and the unique set up of various pages and poems are a wonderful surprise, adding to the overall feel of this book. A pleasure to read.
January 27, 2024
An ABSOLUTELY AMAZING book of poetry. It's intricate and honest.
Also I've never actually read any literature with alternative pronouns such as ze/zir or hir/hirs before so I'm glad that that is available in this book at least.
There's too many lines I adored in this book for me to quote any. Fucken READ THIS BOOK.
Some bits were less amazing but still really good.
Also I've never actually read any literature with alternative pronouns such as ze/zir or hir/hirs before so I'm glad that that is available in this book at least.
There's too many lines I adored in this book for me to quote any. Fucken READ THIS BOOK.
Some bits were less amazing but still really good.
May 19, 2023
Sabbatical, go and gone, gender options, regarding your suspension, reaction(ary), she, tender, and diary of a lavender plant collectively brought it to 4 stars. Especially diary of a lavender plant.
May 3, 2021
I don't know much about poetry, but I know what I like - and despite not even being near the centre of the target audience for this book, I dig it.
January 30, 2022
Really liked it.
February 25, 2024
These poems were so moving & eye opening. I loved the narrative that was throughout this.
March 6, 2024
3.5/5 Good visuals. I’ll probably come back to it for inspiration
March 29, 2024
as with poetry, some is hit or miss. I enjoyed a few of them. some of the ones with odd formatting was a little odd for my smooth brain to understand.
April 5, 2024
2 1/2 stars actually. some poems alone were 5 stars but as a whole it was little jumbled.
April 8, 2024
good but nothing stand out
June 23, 2025
in my post-reading journal marked this as 4 stars, but gonna be honest, I don't remember really anything from it
January 20, 2025
Some lovely and some confronting poems. The writer's use of language is visceral in places, delicate and nuanced in others. An amazing collection.
January 13, 2022
Started off quite mind-blowingly, ended up just okay. 3.5 rounded down.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews