Dolls

by Tom Whalen

Overview

This collection of thirty prose poems by Tom Whalen was the winning manuscript in the 2006 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Denise Duhamel.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013087712
Publisher:	Caketrain
Publication date:	04/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	118 KB

About the Author

TOM WHALEN’S poetry and prose have appeared in AGNI, Caketrain, Fiction
International, Gargoyle, The Georgia Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Idaho
Review, The Iowa Review, Marginalia, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review,
Northwest Review, Ploughshares, The Quarterly, Sentence, Seattle Review, Sonora
Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, as well as in several anthologies. His
books include An Exchange of Letters, Roithamer’s Universe, Elongated Figures, and
Winter Coat. He lives in Stuttgart, Germany.

Editorial Reviews

“Baudelaire wrote that ‘the overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys.’ Rilke claimed that when children realize that their dolls are inanimate, that their toys have no souls at all, they grow disgusted with their dolls. Enter Tom Whalen....these beautifully crafted prose poems are as animated and frightening as voodoo dolls—think the American Girl collection in the hands of Cindy Sherman. Dolls delighted and scared me beyond belie

Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day

“As a boy, I did horrible things to my sister’s dolls. But nothing so cruel as to bring them to life; to make them suffer, yearn, procreate, seek, secrete, and contemplate mortality. Tom Whalen is a virtuoso of personification (the sacred purview of the prose poet) and a sadist of playthings. Dolls is an entrancing and playfully disquieting collection.”

Peter Conners, author of Emily Ate the Wind

“If you like your dolls haunted and licentious, you’ve come to the right place. Tom Whalen’s preternatural creations remind me of Hans Bellmer’s fetish dolls, as possessed by the Bride of Chucky....Don’t dare to read these voodoo poems on a rainy night in a creaky old Victorian house. And if you try, remember that I warned you.”

Richard Peabody, co-editor of Mondo Barbie

“Tom Whalen’s book is malign and unsettling and darkly outré—he re-Wittgensteins the world that used to be the case through the impassive, but vigilant, eyes of his dolls, and returns it to us strikingly changed.”

Sven Birkerts, editor of AGNI at Boston University