Mouthguard

The poems in Sadie Dupuis' Mouthguard are a means of developing a deep personal mythology; to read them is to feel what self-discovery is, and then recognize it in the rearview mirror, disappearing over the broken American horizon. They emerge from the place where known experience and the unknown collide; a borderline we all cross on the way to becoming ourselves.

Mouthguard's poems are magical escapism; devotional affirmations of manic love, or incantations about illness and loss and the strangeness of bodies. Sometimes they're creepy, sometimes droll, very often woe-is-me narcissistic.

Like crying alone in a movie theater, Mouthguard is tender, self-deprecating, nostalgic, and unavoidably romantic. In the end, we're all simultaneously comforted and freaked out by the idea that there is something bigger and deeper in the quiet spaces that operate within us, something just out of reach. This book gives us the language to describe this, a solid place we can remember together.