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by Charlotte Jean (Author)
Soft Things Have Sharp Teeth is a fierce collection about the making of a woman who is taught early that softness is dangerous.
Somewhere along the way, women are handed a choice: maiden or monster. Be good, be gentle, be desirable, or become hard enough to survive what the world will do to you. These poems explore the violence of that choice and the ways women are shaped by family, faith, desire, grief, and the expectations placed upon them.
The collection begins in the wound and follows a woman as she learns to sharpen herself for survival. She becomes armored, hungry, and difficult to contain. She loses people along the way and discovers that not everyone can follow her into the fire. Yet beneath the armor, something soft remains.
Through intimacy, eroticism, love, and reclamation, she begins to understand that softness does not have to mean surrender. She can choose who gets to touch her vulnerability, who gets to help remake her, and what parts of herself are worth protecting. Even surrender can become an act of power when it happens on her terms.
But becoming strong does not make her invulnerable. When the walls eventually collapse, she is forced to confront the enemy within and reconsider what survival actually requires. Perhaps the answer was never becoming harder. Perhaps it was learning how to protect the soft thing instead of destroying it.
Soft Things Have Sharp Teeth is ultimately a collection about trauma, transformation, desire, faith, and self-possession. It refuses the choice between maiden and monster and instead creates something more complicated: a woman who is both soft and ferocious, wounded and sovereign, vulnerable and dangerous.
She has something worth protecting now.
And she has teeth.
