Milk Teeth Collective & Books
Currently, I am working full steam ahead with brilliant artist/designer Una Janicijevic as part of Milk Teeth Collective—a multidisciplinary collaboration that merges poetry, visual storytelling, and public engagement. Our goal is to create immersive experiences that disarm cynicism, awaken empathy, and reshape how readers and viewers interact with the world around them. Stay tuned for some extraordinary projects launching in both 2025 and 2026, including a multigenerational picture book that expands into audio, quiltwork, youth-led art audits and large-scale public installations that reframe public space.
In 2026, my next collection, Teaching, will be published by Nevermore Press and I could not be more delighted. Brilliantly illustrated by Una Janicijevic, this collection takes readers into the walls of a highschool“This is life inside the walls of a school building: TikTok insomnia. The algorithm of absences. Gun violence. Breakfast program anxiety. Bathroom bullies. ESL poetry.”
My 2016 collection, Tourist (Tightrope Books), was written across several continents and explores displacement, wonder, and identity in an increasingly fractured world. I’m deeply grateful for the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Molly Peacock (Series Editor, Best Canadian Poetry), whose mentorship offered a clarity I hadn’t found in a decade of working on my own. Poems from Tourist have been published in The New Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, and Prairie Fire. One was longlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and another highlighted in Best Canadian Poetry Anthology 2015. If you’d like a signed or dedicated copy, I’d love to hear from you.
My debut collection, The Cartographer’s Skin (Piquant Press, 2010), became a Canadian bestseller and was launched at literary festivals and readings across Canada, Ireland, and Singapore. This book continues to find new audiences, and I remain incredibly grateful to the readers who’ve carried its poems into their own lives.
My poetry has also moved into audio spaces through Brickyard (Brick Books Audio), with several poems—Alarm Clocks, Butterfly Remember, Beethoven Walks, and Music Box—featured in the collection. These pieces speak to the interweaving of memory, ritual, and the sensory landscapes of daily life.
In collaboration with composer Mitch Renaud, I developed several performance-based projects that blended poetry and classical music from The Cartographer’s Skin. Our string quartet adaptation of my poem Reckless was performed by the internationally acclaimed St. Lawrence String Quartet (Stanford University) and featured in a concert series at the University of Toronto. We also co-created Generations, a thematic piece for emerging composers, which premiered at Toronto’s historic Haliconian Hall. One of my contributions, Beethoven Walks, was later longlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
For inquiries or collaborative ideas, feel free to reach out: larabozabalian@gmail.com.
