This collection features 20 poems of vivid imagery and raw emotion. Each one feels intensely personal, as though Eric is pouring his heart into the page (and I believe he may very well have been). There’s also lot of ambiguity and metaphor at play, and I loved trying to figure out the various interpretations/meanings behind each. These are certainly ripe for multiple reads!

Eric has a fantastic writing style; one that I’ve really enjoyed in his longer works and that shines just as bright with his poetry. Plenty of evocative descriptions (at one point an egg yolk is described as an “oily corpse”) and intriguing phrases, such as “candied viscera,” “velveteen sunlight,” “teeth of the moon,” “cannibal priests,” and of course the titular “fanged dandelion”.

The imagery is so visceral and powerful, and each poem is a gut punch of emotive memories and experiences. While there’s language like seed, breath, and tender the diction trends much heavier with rot, torture, blood, cut, maggot, coffin, etc. There are also lots of scenes with bad things happening at night and characters devouring one another (in various ways). It’s clear Eric is focusing on the darker and more painful sides of relationships, self-perception, identity, and the human condition.

I enjoyed all of the poems and I appreciate the brutality and honesty present, though one of my favorites is “A Mother is a Kind of God” which seems to be from the perspective of the earth and about a serial killer who delivers victims into her “body”. I’m likely way off ( )