Pownal Street Press is honoured to announce the May 2026 publication of Milk Teeth: Becoming a Mother Through Loss and Rediscovery by Rayya Liebich.
What happens when one motherhood begins just as another is lost?
In a world that glorifies motherhood and shuns grief, Milk Teeth explores the visceral collision of becoming a mother while mourning one. Told through a hybrid form as fragmented and nonlinear as grief itself, this bold collection reclaims story from silence and reshapes the narrative of maternal identity.
Navigating postpartum depression, complex grief, and the ache of “secondary losses,” Milk Teeth challenges the myth of the maternal monolith. With lyrical urgency and structural innovation, the author exposes the systemic forces that shame, silence, and isolate women—especially in their most tender and transformative moments.
At once a love letter to mothering and a lamentation of loss, Milk Teeth is a raw, necessary contribution to the conversation on grief, memory, and the power of telling our truths.
“Rayya’s book is almost ten years in the making,” says Pownal Street Press Editorial Director, Mo Duffy, “ and while it offers a contemporary poetry experience that defies traditional boundaries, it also walks with all mothers in our darkest moments.”
Milk Teeth: Becoming a Mother Through Loss and Rediscovery
ISBN: 9781998129751
$24.95 CAD | Paperback
Release Date: April 28, 2026
The courage and honesty at the heart of Milk Teeth is deeply moving. Rayya Liebich has created a book that is at once formally daring and profoundly intimate, offering language where silence too often resides. What makes this work unique is its ability to hold grief and love in the same breath, reminding us that motherhood, in all its forms, is complex, contradictory, and deeply human. We couldn’t be more proud to bring the tenderness and innovation found in this collection into the world.
At Pownal Street Press, we believe in books that spark conversation and create space for truth. Milk Teeth does exactly that. This is a collection that mothers, daughters, and readers of all kinds will see themselves reflected in. We are honoured to share her voice and to welcome this extraordinary book into our publishing family.
About the Author
Rayya Liebich is a writer and educator of Lebanese and Polish descent. Devoted to the tools of poetry and nonlinear forms of nonfiction to transform loss and to tell authentic stories, she is the author of three chapbooks: Tell Me Everything, Khalas/Enough and Litany of Words I Cannot Read, and a poetry collection, Min Hayati, published by Inanna Publications. Winner of the International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir, Briarpatch’s Writing in the Margins Contest, and The Federation of BC Writers Lit Contest, Rayya’s words can be found in The Rumpus, Geist, Room, Protean Magazine, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She believes in the power of words to change minds and hearts, and in the responsibility of artists to be truth-tellers. Find her online at https://www.rayyaliebich.com and on Instagram @rayliebich.
Pownal Street Press is PEI’s newest publishing house. Women-owned and women-led, friendly, warm and professional, we exist to give rise to brave stories, and to be a light for community and connection. With distribution through Raincoast Books (Canada) and Orca Books (US), Pownal Street Press’s titles have national reach but local heart. For more information about the press and its books, please visit: www.pownalstreetpress.com.