Poetry & Art
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MOUTH

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MOUTH by Becca Rae Rose

Reviewed by Shanta Lee

 
 

What is one of the main things we have in common with sharks after death? Between our milk teeth and adult teeth, what is the path of development?

MOUTH answers these questions, but is not a book that does not bother with the slow burn starting in medias res, in the middle of all the things that will unzip the answers to those questions.

This collection of lyric essays begins with, “Baby, he says, less teeth,” only to quickly follow as clash points of the following are brought together: intimacy and violence; scientific fact juxtaposed with granular moments in the wild (Yes, this includes humans); philosophical and existential; power and disempowerment (and no, not in the ways you might assume); and hard edges pressed against, sometimes enmeshing with, the soft and vulnerable.

Through bringing all of these things together alongside of the fact that this collection can be devoured easily within one sitting due to its liquid nature, Becca Rae Rose Does not take the reader’s engagement for granted. Each opportunity, each page, each section encountered, bring us in close contact with an investigation of the human mouth with surgical precision. The collection signals and warns , through sentences like, “What if I became a woman not through an event but through a slow gathering of instructions?” We are reminded while being instructed, “…we knew that survival isn’t just about what you can sink your teeth into.

No different than the transformation that takes place by the end of Angela Carter’s, “The Tiger’s Bride,” we are left shocked, awed, glee-filled, and rereading from the beginning for clues. We are also left, asking ourselves, does the human mouth and what we put into it, serve as a tale of caution or an invitation to become? Can it be both?

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Shanta Lee

Shanta Lee is an award winning artist who works in different mediums as a photographer, curator, writer across genres, and a public intellectual. She is the author of the poetry collection, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Her collection Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) was a finalist for the Hudson prize, shortlisted for the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and longlisted for the Idaho poetry prize.

To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com.