In All That Teethes Within, poet Kari Gunter-Seymour translates the poignant complexity of loss into words. This exploration of heartache is layered with the poet's Appalachian identity and overflows with sadness and anger toward the forces that cause societal and environmental damage in the region. The poems mourn a loved one's sudden passing, opportunity missed due to poverty or gender inequality, and the piece of one's identity that vanishes or fades with age.
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Gunter-Seymour's interrogation of grief and destruction quietly weaves in elements of nature—Breezes whistle like wisps of memory / inside clusters of hemlock—to counter profound pain. Small joys found in friendship, the land, grandchildren, and wildlife round out this masterful collection. All That Teethes Within reckons with the incomprehensible reality of a sibling's suicide, serving as a guide for survival and a call to speak the truth of our anguish and our rapture.
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All That Teethes Within by Kari Gunter-Seymour is a rare & important poetry collection that navigates the cruel, lonesome, surreal terrain–the cloistered fissure, the desperate space–of suicide loss survivorship. As someone who has survived the suicide of my own sister, I know that It takes tremendous endurance to write a book like this. Each gripping poem, each gorgeous, brilliant image, serves as both a dirge & an ode, feels like holding a snow angel, trapped in its final thrash, like wandering, lost, in a graveyard / of strangled roots. These poems held me the way that I have learned to hold grief–the terrible seed that we bury & unearth, that morphs and never leaves us as the world, and life, goes on without them.
-Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter Of Three Gone Kingdoms
"Kari Gunter-Seymour's stunning book-length elegy to her sister speaks to the singular intimacy between siblings, and the singular ache of living on after a beloved sibling dies. I felt a pain in my jaw reading these brave, clear-minded poems that are as much about a lost sister as they are about the communal losses that contributed to her death. All That Teethes Within is a nuanced, extraordinary book from a poet at the height of her talents."
-Idra Novey, author of Soon and Wholly
Kari Gunter Seymour’s beautiful and searing new book, All That Teethes Within, is an expansive elegy for a lost sister, one who never found a gentle path to travel or a comfortable way to be in the world, but who was loved nevertheless. Alongside their wordplay and wicked sense of humor, these poems convey a visceral pain and take a steel-hard look at how grief transforms us: I’ve become a dark-eyed junco,/ flown headfirst into a plate-glass window, flung/ in no uncertain terms against hard ground,/ gravel prickling my spine. Gunter-Seymour’s metaphors continually dazzle and awaken, attuned to seasons, birds, and May’s milk moon spilling its creamery. The poems offer no easy consolations but instead confront something more valuable: how we are to live with our suffering after unconsolable loss, and how to survive when one we love ends their own life. All That Teethes Within is an essential book of poems by one of our most brave and true poets, and I read it through and again with gratitude for Kari Gunter-Seymour’s strength and vision.
-Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days
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