Split Tooth

Content Warning: This section contains discussion of childhood sexual assault, sexual abuse, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, and substance abuse. 

This book has an unusual format. Instead of numbered chapters, the book features prose sections, poems, abstract dreamlike sequences, and illustrations. Some sections have names; others do not.

Split Tooth opens with an epigraph from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

The first section, “1975,” describes the narrator, a young girl, in a closet with other children hiding from drunk and violent adults. The narrator’s uncle, whose head is bleeding, finds them and drunkenly tells them not to be afraid. An illustration depicts the uncle with a bloody face, standing over the children in the doorway of the closet. 

The poem “A Day in the Life” describes the narrator’s experience in fifth grade, where her teacher and boys in her class regularly sexually abuse her and the other girls. 

The narrator lives in a small community in the Canadian Arctic. In spring and summer, daylight lasts 24 hours, and the children enjoy their freedom after a long winter indoors. The narrator and her friends push makeshift rafts out into a large pond, though none of them can swim. A week later, seven children drown playing in a different pond; the narrator and her friends never play their game again.