A Doll for Throwing: Poems
No reviews
- Lifetime warranty
- Free shipping on orders $59.99+ USD
- In stock, ready to ship
Note: This item is made to order. Shipping for this item may be delayed.
The exquisite new collection by the award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang, author of The Last Two Seconds and Elegy
We were ridiculous―me, with my high jinks and hat. Him, with his boredom and drink. I look back now and see buildings so thick that the life I thought I was making then is nothing but interlocking angles and above them, that blot of gray sky I sometimes saw. Underneath is the edge of what wasn’t known then. When I would go. When I would come back. What I would be when.
―from “One Glass Negative”
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.
We were ridiculous―me, with my high jinks and hat. Him, with his boredom and drink. I look back now and see buildings so thick that the life I thought I was making then is nothing but interlocking angles and above them, that blot of gray sky I sometimes saw. Underneath is the edge of what wasn’t known then. When I would go. When I would come back. What I would be when.
―from “One Glass Negative”
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.
Shipping is free for all orders shipped within the United States for orders $59.99 and over. All other orders have a nominal fee of $4.99 unless customers choose faster delivery via for $9.99.
Orders are processed Monday-Friday in the order that they are received.
