Tooth Gaps in the Archives: Poems (Button Poetry) - Softcover

Francis Dylan Wagues

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1638341508 ISBN 13: 9781638341505

Publisher: Button Poetry, 2026

Synopsis

Set in Southeast Louisiana—one of the last regions in the contemporary United States to resist full Americanization—Tooth Gaps in the Archives traces how place-based cultural memory persists beyond its disappearing geography and amid a cycle of forced migration, an emerging domestic climate diaspora, and the slow violence enacted against a people whose power has been systematically withheld through regulatory capture. In Tooth Gaps, Louisiana is not rendered as the unlucky exception or a site of tragedy, but as a resource extraction colony, its people asked to disappear quietly to facilitate the commodification and consumption of their land, labor, and culture.

Moving between lyric poems and documentary prose, Tooth Gaps drops the reader directly into the speaker’s interior and exterior worlds without mediation, creating an immersive, embodied experience that refuses abstraction and distance. From the very first to the very last page, it insists on the body as archive and frames the very existence of the people of Louisiana as an act of resistance.

About this title

About the Author

Francis Dylan Waguespack (he/they) is a painter and Pushcart-nominated poet from New Orleans who writes about the politics of disasters and being from a place and in a body that both live under threat. He is 34, and therefore recently found out about birds. His work appears in many publications including ONLY POEMS DAILY, wildness journal, The Penn Review, and Foglifter. He was a finalist for the 2025 St. Lawrence Poetry Award and won the 2025 Button Poetry First Book Award for his debut collection, Tooth Gaps in the Archives, forthcoming from Button Poetry in the fall of 2026.

Edition details

• Publisher: Button Poetry
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1638341508
• ISBN 13: 9781638341505
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88