The Dagger Between Her Teeth

By Jennifer LoveGrove

Skulls and crossbones: 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 vengeance: "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 romance: "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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550225111
• ISBN13: 9781550225112
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Misfit Book
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.3"