Book Review: Teeth by Aracelis Girmay

Aracelis Girmay's poetry collection, Teeth, though rather new on the scene, is no timid voice on the poetic stage. The poetry of Teeth is often bold, brave, and dark, but also joyously triumphant. It is both a poetry of protest and of celebration. It rails against discrimination, despair, death, rape, and war, and celebrates the enduring beauty, strength and perseverance of peoples, languages and cultures.

Aracelis Girmay is a writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She was born and raised in Southern California and has a degree from Connecticut College and an MFA from NYU. Girmay is a current Cave Canem Fellow and former Watson Fellow, and her work has appeared in Callaloo, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and MiPOesias Magazine, among others. She has worked as a writer-in-residence with the Community-Word Project and Teachers & Writers Collaborative, as well as the CARE project in her native Santa Ana, and believes her work as writer and educator to be integral to social change. Teeth, published by Curbstone Press in June 2007, is her first collection of poetry.

Girmay begins her collection with a poem of protest entitled "Arroz Poetica." The title alludes to Horace's Ars Poetica, a long epistolary poem on the art of poetry. Girmay substitutes 'ars' (art) with 'arroz' (rice). Instead of discussing the art of poetry, this poem discusses poetic rice, as in rice as a metaphor, a symbol of protest. It opens with a friend's suggestion that everyone against the war should protest by sending George Bush little bags of rice inscribed with "If your enemies are hungry, feed them."

The rest of the poem argues, essentially, that her enemies

are not hungry.
They are not standing in lines
for food, or stretching rations,
or waiting at the airports
to claim the pieces
of the bodies of their dead.

Rather, her enemies "ride jets to parties... eat meat & vegetables at tables/ in white houses where candles blaze, cast/ shadows of crosses, & flowers." Her enemies, dressed up in "ball gowns & suits & rings" sit around "to talk of war in neat & folded languages/ that will not stain their formal dinner clothes/ or tousle their hair." Her finger points directly at George Bush and his administration as the real enemy, and she will not send him worked for rice while the death toll rises, while the "radio calls out/ the local names of 2,000/ U.S. soldiers counted dead since March," but "will not say the names/ of an Iraqi family trying to pass a checkpoint." The imagery is powerful and personal.

Article Author: Abram Bergen

Abram Bergen is a logophile, thinker, reader, and writer. His research/writing interests include gender and sexuality issues, hybridity and identity politics, secular ethics, and ecosensitive technologies and lifestyles. …

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