Book Party for award-winning poetry debut "Tooth Gaps in the Archives"

Join poet Francis Dylan Waguespack for the launch of their debut poetry collection, Tooth Gaps in the Archives, winner of the Button Poetry 2025 First Book Award and finalist for the St. Lawrence Award (Black Lawrence Press).

We’ll begin the evening with a brief reading from the collection, followed by a Q&A, before settling into the main event: celebrating, having a drink, talking about poetry (or anything else), and being together.

The reading and conversation will wrap by approximately 6:30–6:45 PM, leaving the rest of the evening open for mingling, books, drinks, and revelry.

Admission is free. Signed copies of Tooth Gaps in the Archives will be available at the launch, and you can pre-order a signed copy with your RSVP to guarantee a book will be waiting for you at the event.

About Tooth Gaps in the Archives

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.

From first to last page, it insists on the body as archive and frames the very existence of the people of Louisiana as an act of defiance against the ceaselessly hungry state machinery of forgetting.

Praise for Tooth Gaps in the Archives

"Francis Dylan Waguespack's astonishing debut collection of poetry, Tooth Gaps in the Archives, has no limitations. Moving from the implacable power of water to the impermanence of land, the cruelty of reactionary government policy to the liminal tenderness of the body, Waguespack's work seems nearly impossible. Like a magnifying glass held over a lost manuscript, Toothgaps brings a previously unknown South into undeniable clarity. Gifted with revelation after stunning revelation, this reader gasped many times."

— Maurice Carlos Ruffin, 2026 Guggenheim Fellow and national bestselling author of The American Daughters

"Tooth Gaps in the Archives is meticulously distilled, poem after poem, in striking devotion to kith, kin, and place. These poems draw their stunning clarity from generations of Southeast Louisiana beloveds, unshakable trans family, and the grit earned from surviving this capitalist hellscape. Waguespack speaks from a body many lineages, like rivers, have fed and made full, that many systems have tried to run dry, that many generations have waded and walked to arrive here."

— Desireé Dallagiacomo, author of SINK