Barrelhouse Reviews: Tooth Box, by Jenny Irish

Spuyten Duyvil / November 2021 / 82 pp

“Ten years from now I will think of Texas as the end of girlhood,” writes Jenny Irish in the closing poem of Tooth Box. This end encapsulates the constant question Irish asks the reader throughout the collection: where were you when everything changed? By inviting us in with gut-punching tales dusted in dark comedy, Irish elicits instinctual sense memories of the smells, textures, and vivid characters who starred in our own childhoods. The voice of a curious yet fearful child is ever-present in these poems, while a reflective and mature adult voice swoops in occasionally as a knowing comfort. While each poem stands on its own by varying in mood, form, and length, they all serve as stepping-stones on a girl’s journey of grappling with the faults of the adults around her.

The errors of men are present in this journey; the speaker’s own father proves untrustworthy. Treacherous men cycle in and out of the speaker’s life, whether an uncle in “Tides,” a potential stepfather in “The MotherFucker,” or a hunter in the woods in the title poem. The speaker boldly grapples with the place of one particular man in her life, with whom her parents left her while they were unable to care for her, in “Possibilities.” Irish powerfully examines the meaning of domesticity and intimacy through his interactions with her as well as with other women she observes from afar. Each stanza is dripping with curiosity and concern, most notably the closing one:

I did think I could be a child bride. The first great crisis of my life: did
I want this man as a father or a lover? Choices are easier then there
are none, and there is nothing new here. Turn over mulch and there
may be maggots, but here, there is no new life to find: a bad man can
be good to animals and children and still be a bad man

The last lines of “Possibilities” shine on her discovery of the duplicitous nature of men, while leaving room for readers to replace “man” with any word or person they see fit. Lines like these continually invite readers to participate with the poems. This open invitation allows the poems’ tales to breathe and move with the readers’ experiences, as each reader sees herself in the speaker and her interactions.

Many of the poems touch on a wavering connection between mother and daughter. In “Pearls,” the speaker demonstrates in a comedic sense how this tense relationship is a result of an intergenerational cycle of disapproval. “At dinner, my mother wore a delicate gold chain with a gold charm / shaped like a scallop’s shell, a pearl set in its center. You look like a / tourist, my great grandmother said.” Although the great grandmother’s comment is humorous, this moment allows the speaker to witness how her mother’s the harshness in her mother extends back into her maternal bloodline.

In “Birdsong,” the speaker experiences firsthand critiques while she stays at her eccentric grandmother’s home. In this setting, the grandmother demonstrates her freedom to either rejoice in or burden her granddaughter. For example, the speaker notes her grandmother’s harsh comment on their physical differences:

Hatched from an egg, this woman said throughout
my childhood because I resemble no woman from her line.
There was no affection in it: Hatched from an egg.
Why sleep again and risk the waking?
I can sit the shift of light, night to day,
from not-silence to wild birdsong,
looking at the darker skin of my hand
on the paler skin of my breast.

The unaffectionate label the grandmother sets upon her granddaughter symbolizes the speaker’s detachment from her family. The speaker reinforces that her girlhood lacked positive recognition from her mother, grandmother, and other key authority figures.

Additionally, for any readers sifting through the presence of uncertainty in their childhood, a fear of sleeping and waking resonates deeply, and Irish expresses it repeatedly throughout the collection. She also exercises a reflective adult voice as she considers the fragility of human life. In the opening lines of “Denouement,” this worry expands to humans’ connection to the literary world:

I worry about the dead who have died unable to finish the last book
they were reading and that they are haunted by questions of a story
that has an end they were not able to reach.

Rather than the uncertainty of a new day, this stanza demonstrates the fear of losing the ability to know what we are in the process of discovering. The speaker artfully describes how life remains permanently unfinished. Paths not taken, words not said, relationships not healed, and books partially read.

Even as it comes in the middle of the collection, the words of Irish’s single-line poem “Deadeye” perfectly encapsulate the bold tenacity she applies while revisiting her girlhood journey:

I will continue to sharpen these stones until all are brought to a point.

There is a point Tooth Box continues to stretch toward, where readers feel comfort, curiosity, and concern simultaneously. Each poem encourages readers to reminisce on their own childhood and the adults who shaped it; to relish the notes of comedy, acknowledge the moments of fear, and see those seconds where everything changed.

Megan Griffin is an emerging writer from the Quiet Corner of Connecticut. Currently living in Massachusetts, she has a BA in professional writing from Bay Path University and is pursuing her MA in English from Bridgewater State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Months to Years, and Parhelion.