Why Mik Grantham Insisted on Having a Tooth on Her Book Cover

Mik Grantham is the guest. Her poetry collection, Hardcore, is out now from Short Flight/Long Drive Books.

From the episode:

Mik Grantham: Any appointment like that, I’ll get nervous if I’m not comfortable with the doctor. That’s the only time I get freaked out about doctor appointments. The dentist, I just—because of all my tooth drama, I really don’t like the dentist.

Brad Listi: Hey, you know what? I’m just having a thought here, Mik. I have an uncle who’s a dentist in Louisiana.

Mik: Hook a girl up. Let’s get a tooth!

Brad: Let me see what I can do. Maybe he’s got some extra teeth lying around.

Mik: Yeah, let’s get the process started.

Brad: So you have a tooth on the cover of your book. I imagine you weighed in on that, or was that something that the cover designer extracted? Pun intended.

Mik: I really wanted a tooth on the cover. That was like the only thing that I cared about being on the cover was a tooth. And actually, Chelsea Martin did the cover. You’ve had Chelsea Martin on before; she wrote Caca Dolce. 

Brad: Multiple times.

Mik: Yeah, yeah. So she did the cover, and I just really wanted the tooth to be on there. Because as I was working on the book, I started to think, teeth represent so many different things to me in the book. There’s a lot of loss in that book.

Brad: I feel like, you lose a tooth—this isn’t the only thing that it makes me think of, but it does make me think of death. It’s like bodily decay, the transience of the human form. The way that, not to get gross about it, but eventually it just turns into like a stinking, rotting carcass, you know? I think it’s worth considering that sort of stuff. I like to remember that, in a weird way, maybe, because it sort of wakes me up from the trance of everyday life.

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Mik Grantham is the founder and co-editor of Disorder Press, which she runs with her brother. Her work has appeared in New World Writing, Hobart, Maudlin House, The Nervous Breakdown, and Fanzine. She currently lives in New Orleans. Hardcore is her first book.