BOOK RELEASE DAY:
Tooth Gaps in the Archives by Francis Dylan Waguespack
“Take the memory of solid ground, not to return to it, but to remember what it costs to leave our footprints underwater.”
Francis Dylan Waguespack
We are pleased to announce the release of Tooth Gaps in the Archives by Francis Dylan Waguespack, the winner of the 2025 Button Poetry First Book Contest!
Read on to discover Waguespack’s debut collection!
“Waguespack’s Tooth Gaps in the Archives is a love letter to a sinking home, to all of the ways a government can abandon both a place and a people.”
Ollie Schminkey
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.
From the author:
“I write for my ancestors, for the lost generations of Louisiana Creoles, and for our descendants who will begin and end their lives found, knowing always who they are and among whom they belong. But I also write for you, anyone who is reading these words and feels a tug on their links to the rest of the people of the world. Thank you for reading. I hope you find something here that is meaningful to you.”
– FDW
“Waguespack’s astonishing debut collection of poetry has no limitations—like a magnifying glass held over a lost manuscript, Tooth Gaps brings a previously unknown South into undeniable clarity.”
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Author Bio
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 this, his debut collection, Tooth Gaps in the Archives.
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