The exquisite new collection by award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang, author of The Last Two Seconds and Elegy
A Doll for Throwing
Poems
- “Mary Jo Bang bends and tosses ideas as easily as one would a Wurfpuppe, a flexible doll created by Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher that always landed with grace when thrown.”—The Washington Post
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”
—from “One Glass Negative”
A Doll for Throwing takes its title from 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 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.
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About the Author
Credit: Matt Valentine
Praise
- “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
- “Brilliant. . . . While A Doll for Throwing is an urgent work of art history and archival research, it also speaks directly to the present.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
- “Coldly beautiful and relentlessly quotable.”—Poets.org
- One of the Academy of American Poets' Books Noted 2017
