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Praise for MOUTH

Rejecting ironic detachment, MOUTH roves, like a series of Nan Golden snapshots, across a life jagged with trouble. When Becca Rae Rose says, "Our teeth outlive us," an anatomical fact rings like a warning. This is a wise, unsettling book.

—Joshua Davis, author of Authentic Embellishments: Fragments of a Life Saved by Poetry

In this stunning collection, Becca Rae Rose gets as close as a dentist with a mouth mirror, using the language of teeth to explore themes of sexuality and societal expectation, braiding together childhood memories with a present moment in the bathroom of a bar. MOUTH is an enduring collection that has the power to challenge perceptions. This lyrical journey presents a meditation on each quadrant of the mouth, asking, “What is a girl without her smile?” and noting that long after we die, our teeth are the only thing left: “Call it decoration, call it relic. Keep it beneath a pillow or wear it on a necklace.”

 –Rosa Sophia Godshall, author of Many Miles

Becca Rae Rose’s MOUTH doesn’t extend the courtesy of a warning bark. No, this little chapbook starts chomping with the very first word, and even after you’re finished reading, it won’t let you go—days later, weeks later: smarting, tender, vicious, an infectious fevering delight.

 –Lily Hoang, Professor of Literature at UCSD and author of A Bestiary and Underneath

“Tell me again about the order of things,” writes Becca Rae Rose in this astonishingly lyrical and personal essay. With each tooth an archival site for inquiry and remedy, Rose questions and disrupts those harmful hierarchies that devalue women and their bodies. She does so by making startling connections across species, and thus deftly highlighting a deep ecology of tooth, tusk, and fang. From the incisors, the incisive—this is extraordinary writing, tenacious in its reflection and brilliant in its many insights.

—Brandon Som, author of Tripas

Becca Rae Rose is a triple fire sign, cribbage player, and a wannabe wildlife biologist. She’s a graduate of the MFA Program in Writing at UC San Diego and a co-founder of ( peel lit ) and KALEIDOSCOPED MAG. Her work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Swamp Ape Review, and PANK. She lives and teaches in San Diego, where she’s working on a novel about bats.