Tooth Box tells of a girlhood familiar to many—a girlhood of strange cruelties and the ever-present threat of violence. Irish writes with a mesmerizing attention to detail and a gift for the startling and uncanny. The girl in these sensuous poems wanders through a dark fairytale-esque world, alert to being taken, cut, punctured, and eaten: "to expect care from no one." It's one of the few poetry books I've read that accurately captures the tender, but brutal relationships between girls. Written with a fluid, dreamlike beauty, it is "a story built from the sticks and bleached and brittle bones of a truth...about girls who...become animals to save themselves." Jessica Cuello, Author of Liar In the title poem of this stunning collection, a tooth box is described as a “fragile capsule for caging time.” The same could be said—could it not?—of a poem, yet these poems and prose pieces are not fragile capsules—they are stones sharpened to points; they are stories that burst open like our spiral galaxy, growing larger and larger with each turn. Jenny Irish powerfully undoes the time called girlhood, drawing us into a world—our world—where girls can so easily disappear, dragged under by men, by alligator, by indifference, a world where girls brim with bewilderment and hunger, a world where even the softest of cosseting can’t keep us safe. Tooth Box is unflinching, unforgettable. Gayle Brandeis, Author of Many Restless Concerns What does Jenny Irish’s Tooth Box hold? A rabid girlhood of hybrid understanding, a quiet body yearning to express itself, and a wilderness of adults with mixed intentions. This book is stunning in its ability to move through and across form as a means to best express childhood discovery and trauma. Leaving readers wondering, where is my tooth box? What secret selves does my tooth box hold? Inventive, gut-wrenching, and full of strength, Irish’s work is in a category of its own. Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Author of Lima :: Limón