Book of the Week: SPLIT TOOTH by Tanya Tagaq

Split Tooth, by Inuk writer, composer and singer Tanya Tagaq, is presented as a sequence of heightened verbal experiences conveying a teenager’s coming of age in the Canadian far north. The book eschews the narrative binds of the literary fiction novel as we typically see it, alternating between poems, short vignettes that read like flash fiction, and lengthier passages that unfold wondrous, spiritual happenings in the vein of magical realism before returning with a snap to the realities of Arctic indigenous life, and meandering back again through literary forms, artistic genres, and modes of being, thinking, experiencing, knowing.

• ”I show you my teeth, through a mouth mostly open.”

• Coming of age in the High Arctic.

• Read an extract.

• Fracturing to survive.

• With and beyond the words.

• Tagaq reads from the book.

• The illustrations are by Jaime Hernandez.

• Naked on the tundra in mosquito season.

• Whistle at the Northern Lights.

• Circumpolar truth.

• Putting words first.

• Teeth Agape.

• Colonizer.

• Tongues.

• Visit the author’s website.

• Making Björk look tame.

• Nunavut.