Curiosity No. 2 Has Dropped: Tender Things With Teeth
Not everything sharp arrives with a warning.
Some things draw you in first. A voice that feels familiar. A body you recognize. A moment that seems almost gentle, almost safe. And then, slowly, something underneath begins to press through, something harder, more insistent, something that does not ask permission to stay.
Tender Things With Teeth gathers three books that move through longing, appetite, vulnerability, and defiance, revealing how what appears soft can still leave a mark. These are works that do not announce their edge so much as let it emerge, asking the reader to notice when the surface shifts and something more complicated begins to take shape.
In If the Sky Won’t Have Me, Anne Leigh Parrish moves through the layered realities of the human condition with a quiet precision that resists spectacle. The poems attend to family, aging, politics, the natural world, and the particular complexities of the female experience, returning again and again to images of water, to erosion, to renewal, to the slow transformations that rarely happen all at once. There is a steadiness here that might be mistaken for ease, but the emotional weight accumulates carefully, gathering force beneath the surface. These are poems that understand survival not as a dramatic act, but as something sustained, something lived inside day after day.
That sense of accumulation fractures in Mouth, Kerry Donoghue’s debut collection, where desire refuses to remain contained. Here, appetite becomes its own kind of language. The characters, a competitive eater, a rodeo clown, a pearl diver, a mermaid-in-training, move through worlds that feel slightly off-center, yet their hungers are immediately recognizable. Whether through alcohol, sex, ambition, or obsession, they push past the boundaries of what should be enough, only to find that the wanting persists. Donoghue does not offer resolution or restraint. Instead, she allows desire to expand, to distort, to reveal what lies beneath it, asking what it means to be shaped by what we cannot seem to satisfy.
In Forms of Defiance, Cynthia C. Sample takes that tension and turns it inward, breaking apart traditional narrative structure in order to expose how people construct meaning from their own lives. Stories unfold through unexpected forms, playlists, diaries, fragments, each one reflecting not just what happened, but how it is understood, revised, and carried forward. The effect is cumulative and disorienting in the best way, revealing how identity is built through these small, often private acts of interpretation. The defiance here is not always visible, but it is constant, embedded in the ways people refuse to fully accept the roles or explanations handed to them.
Taken together, these books move through a shared space where tenderness and sharpness are not opposites, but reflections of one another. They ask the reader to sit inside that tension, to recognize how vulnerability can also be a form of precision, how openness can cut just as deeply as force.
There is a particular kind of power in what does not immediately declare itself. These books trust that power. They do not rush toward clarity or resolution. They linger, they complicate, they press.
Tender Things With Teeth is available now as part of The Unsolicited Press Curiosities series.
Three books. One unexpected shelf. Available for a limited time before the cabinet shifts.
