A Doll for Throwing
Poems
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ISBN10: 1555977812
ISBN13: 9781555977818
Paperback
88 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.99
A Doll for Throwing takes its title from the Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s Wurfpuppe, a flexible and durable woven doll that, if thrown, would land with grace. A ventriloquist is also said to “throw” her voice into a doll that rests on the knee. Mary Jo Bang’s prose poems in this fascinating book create a speaker who had been a part of the Bauhaus school in Germany a century ago and who had also seen the school’s collapse when it was shut by the Nazis in 1933. Since this speaker is not a person but only a construct, she is also equally alive in the present and gives voice to the conditions of both time periods: nostalgia, xenophobia, and political extremism. The life of the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy echoes across these poems—the end of her marriage, the loss of her negatives, and her effort to continue to make work and be known for having made it.
Reviews
Praise for A Doll for Throwing
“Daring, direct, and always-surprising poetry . . . A Doll for Throwing explores the political alongside the personal: nostalgia, xenophobia, and political extremism; art, marriage, and loss.”—Bustle
“Many of these prose poems are dream-like, philosophical takes that require time and reflection . . . Bang can make her narrators find the surreal moments from their pasts that ring curiously true.”—The Millions
“A haunting exploration of a past world whose terrors still ring true today, A Doll for Throwing testifies to the permanency of art [and] the value in creating.”—Ms. Magazine
“Bang’s impeccable collection reads as a ‘circular mirror of the social order,’ reflecting the historicity of our current moment with wit, subtlety, and grace.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)