Name: Dolls
SKU: DOL112021
Availability: InStock

Dolls

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Author: Claire Millikin Introduction: Sean Frederick Forbes Print Edition: ISBN: 978-1-1734618-17 Product Details: 5 x 8; 144 pp. eBook Edition: ISBN: 978-1-7374465-7-6 LCCN: 2020951825 REVIEWS: 2LP BOOK REVIEWS VIDEO: DOLLS Reading SKU: DOL112021 Categories: Clare Millikin, Poetry Tags: LGBTQ, women

Meet The Author

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.

Contributors

Introduction by Sean Frederick Forbes

SEAN FREDERICK FORBES is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and Assistant Professor-in-Residence, Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He serves as editor of the 2Leaf Press’ series, 2LP EXPLORATIONS IN DIVESRSITY, and has co-edited two books under that series: The Beiging of America, Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century (2017), and WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE WHITE IN AMERICA? Breaking the White Code of Silence, A Collection of Personal Narratives (2016). The author of the poetry collection, Providencia: A Book of Poems (2013), he has written numerous introductions for 2Leaf Press poetry collections. His work has appeared in various journals, including Chagrin River Review, Crab Orchard Review, Long River Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture. http://seanfrederickforbes.com.

Here's What People Are Saying

In DOLLS, Claire Millikin stuns us with her breathtaking poems that address the plight of the silenced Southern woman. In ‘Dolls of Tifton, Georgia,’ she writes that ‘Their silence is from everlasting.’ Haunted, layered with shadows, and elegiac, Millikin’s poems balance the truth-telling speaker with the uneasiness of the topic of the violent suppression of women, these urgently elegant poems ‘do not speak in psalm but in elegy.’ ~Kathleen Ellis, author of Vanishing Act (2007) and Outer-Body Travel (2017)

In these historic (let us hope) days of racial reckoning, Claire Millikin’s DOLLS brings the life of Sage Smith into the spotlight. While the media hounds after the latest white female victim, with social media upping the pulse, here the forgotten life of a disappeared Black trans woman is on full view as the Tragedy it is. An act of courage and political responsibility, DOLLS pushes art into the corners where journalism refuses to go, painting a vivid picture of the violence that stalked Sage Smith every day of her life, and ultimately her vanishing. Perhaps poetry can be a way of resurrection. Holding this book is holding a life. ~Bob Holman, poet, professor, activist, promoter, founder of Bowery Poetry and Bowery Arts + Science