“All That Teethes Within” by Kari Gunter-Seymour

Kari Gunter-Seymour’s fourth full-length poetry collection, All That Teethes Within (University Press of Kentucky, 2026), grapples with death in many forms and is a journey to be savored and held as you meander along with the speakers of these poems who meet each moment with compassion and honesty. For a book about death, there is so much life in this collection. But, of course, the book is not about death, not really. It is about something related but altogether different, grieving. A niece, a sister, a planet in the midst of climate collapse (as gently noted in the poem “What choice do I have anyway?”: “As hot as it is, we may be/ in the coolest summer/ of the rest of our lives.”). There are many reasons to love this collection, but the three that stand out for me all center on Gunter-Seymour’s relationship with and use of power: the power of female familial love and connection, the power of space and place, and the power of language.

Though familial love and connection are present in the poems about the speaker’s sister’s struggles and eventual suicide, such as “Tonight the Light Bulb in My Head Pulled Its Own Chain” and “Loss Up Late,” it is at it’s most evocative in the poem “A History of Fireworks.” The poem chronicles the buying and subsequent lighting of fireworks with the speaker’s son and granddaughters. One granddaughter is excited about a novelty firework shaped like Thor’s hammer. When the firework fails to ignite, the adults are accepting, but the young girl will not admit defeat:

“But my warrior girl persists, Mjölnir aloft, double gripped,

feet planted firm and wider,

shouts her warrior oath ——

then all hell breaks loose.”

The poem goes on to revel in the image of the young girl “agog in the wonder of her power,” an observation that is especially poignant after many poems about the childhood of the speaker and her sister which are full of moments of having their enthusiasm and energy tamped down by social norms and mores. There is change and there is hope for the world seen through the lens of familial love and connection.

Another area Gunter-Seymour’s work shines is in its representation of place. With most poems set in the foothills of the Appalachians, the flora and fauna, not to mention the history and cultural landscape, of southeastern Ohio serve as not only backdrops for the narratives, but also nearly as characters themselves. The hills are “both cradle and grave” as the speaker notes in “The Heft of Heedfulness.” They are a place of nourishment, but also of social control because, as the opening lines of “Because” observe, “it was the ’70s, judgy.” Though all of the poems have images and moments from Appalachian Ohio, the poem “Where I’m Coming From,” originally published in Cultural Daily in February of 2025, stands out in the way it uses these images to make a statement about corporate greed and the future of the area:

A kingfisher swoops in like King Coal,

swallows up all he possibly can,

swaggers his fat belly skyward,

a gluttonous harbinger of calamity.

This poem also highlights another of the collection’s strengths, Gunter-Seymour’s deft use of similes and metaphors. A few of the other most powerful moments of figurative language are “every blossom a fragment of prayer” from “Until I Go Yonder” and “a dark-winged barn owl who-who-ing/ as if it’s some kind of punchline” from “What More Can I Say?” Even when not employing figurative language, the beauty of the poet’s phrasing is breathtaking, such as “What humans cannot tame, they terrorize,” from “I Confess” and “a minor emergency of the self” from “Say She Never Meant To.”

Gunter-Seymour gives us these moments of beauty as she wanders her way through so much grief. Readers who choose to wander with her will find themselves the better for the journey.   

Kari Gunter-Seymour

Kari Gunter-Seymour is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship recipient, former poet laureate of Ohio, and a retired instructor in the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. She is the executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series, Women Speak. Her award-winning poetry collections include Dirt Songs, Alone in the House of My Heart, and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen.