The House Has Teeth - by Aldo Amparán (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In The House Has Teeth, award-winning poet Aldo Amparán offers a profound rumination on violence, trauma, and how the spaces meant to protect us can become the most insidious. How can we make sense of deep pain that was caused by an event we can hardly remember?

Influenced by fever dreams, horror movies, and ghost stories, the poems of this second collection eloquently articulate the way in which people who have been traumatized can carry a violence within themselves. Speakers grapple with an internal unrest that simmers long after the initial wound, becoming attuned to the subtle alarms sounding around them that go unheard by others.

In these pages, nightmares become a vehicle for deeper understanding as Amparán investigates how we learn to live with trauma--how we hold onto it, and how it holds onto us; how it haunts us like a ghost. Lyrical and steeped in surrealism, The House Has Teeth asks whether it's possible to ever escape-- to unknow--such violence. To transcend it. To reach toward love.

Review Quotes

"This book extends the deepest coves of my heart to places of heartbreak and hope I didn't know were there. Against brutish weight and erasure, where one's body in country or alongside another is politicized by its place, Aldo Amparán's poetry stuns with its grace. How to dream a touch from violence the body knows? Tender territory and language back from sharded throat? Elegant and enduring, abounding in retrieval and revelation, this book is alive with the totality of feeling, sharp with the splendor of true personhood."
--Sasha Roque Pimentel

"There is something about intimacy and the way it radiates within a word. In The House Has Teeth, Aldo Amparán shows us through lyric and line, screens and ghosts, body and breath. If the walls in these stanzas could talk, we would only hear the quiet force of form and white space. These poems reminded me about my own body and the unique circumstances of being alive: to desire is to break yourself against oceans, to love is to notice the snow outside, to grieve is to fill a 'room with a river.'"
--Jake Skeets

"The beautiful strangeness of language and the sobering strangeness of life are braided into lyrical brilliance in Aldo Amparán's second book. Here, what haunts the speaker and the language itself is so startling, so deftly stapled down, I often found myself spellbound. Here, queerness and borders are sites of refusals and consolations. These poems are undeniable and exquisite."
--Eduardo Corral

About the Author

Aldo Amparán is the author of Brother Sleep (Alice James Books, 2022), which won the Alice James Award in 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2023. Their second book, The House Has Teeth, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in September 2026. They have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts & CantoMundo. Amparán's work has been published in magazines & anthologies, including the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Born & raised in the border cities of El Paso, TX, USA, & Ciudad Juárez, CHIH, Mexico, Amparán received their MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso.