Description
Finalist, 2019 PEN Open Book Award
Winner, 2019 American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation
Drawing on folklore and fantasy, childhood memory and hallucination, and marked by a tone of piercing divulgence, Teeth Never Sleep nimbly negotiates the split consciousness a culture of dominance requires of men (especially men of color), highlighting the fissures in selfhood created by the pressure to seek submission over intimacy while still wanting desperately to be loved, and tracing the contorted route by which emotional pain finds expression in violence. "The night my girlfriend tells my mother I beat her, / I feel betrayed. This was a secret we kept between us. / That night, I was no longer my mother's loving son," the speaker in one poem confesses, and later "I never wanted to be this kind of animal." And yet, through the lens of ngel Garc a's sharp imagining, men frequently appear as beasts (sometimes literally)--as hybrid beings both tender and brutal--that he steadfastly refuses to let off the hook as he obsessively catalogs the origins of toxic masculinity (the first time I made my mother cry, the first time I pitied my father, the first time I saw a girl bleed) and its quiet, lasting effects: "Still a part of me believes a / man shouldn't cry in front of a woman, even in the dark." In a culture of weaponized masculinity, the poems in Teeth Never Sleep make a doorway of a wound, inviting readers to walk through and sit down inside the raw pain they harbor to meditate on two central, urgent questions: what it means to be a man and how, as a man, to love.
Author: Ángel García
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 10/19/2018
Pages: 70
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9781682260739
ISBN10: 1682260739
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | Hispanic & Latino
About the Author
Ángel García is the son of Mexican immigrants. Born in Texas and raised in Southern California, his work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Huizache, and others.