Dolls

Claire Millikin’s poetry collection, DOLLS, stages a scathing confrontation of gendered and racial oppression. Working through the motif of the doll, the poems interrogate femininity in the traditional South, the damages wreaked by gendered strictures in that culture. The emotional center of the book is an elegy for Sage Smith, an African American transwoman who disappeared from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2012. Through the recurring figure of the doll—the ultra-femme figure who is frozen, damaged, silenced—Millikin protests the conditions of sexism in her natal South. The elegant poems hold poised surfaces above the gaping wound of injustice that still typifies America’s most gothic landscape, the deep South. With a thoughtfully reflective introduction by poet and scholar Sean Frederick Forbes, readers will encounter in DOLLS an unforgiving look at the price of traditional femininity. DOLLS is Millikin’s fourth poetry collection by 2Leaf Press.