Teethmarks

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.