About the Book:

What is the appeal of the miniature, of the simulacrum? What does the dollhouse reveal in its cut-away display of room upon connecting room with Victorian wallpaper, tiny utensils, a roast in the oven, teardrop chandeliers? In this chapbook, Ellie White takes us inside domestic spaces to show us a landscape of wild and disjointed nature, against and in which girlhoods unfurl and develop. In these sharply chiseled, dream-like poems, we’ll find that though “Even heaven gets wrecked,” there is a kind of beauty in detritus: in dried husks and fur of wild things, winged knick knacks of glass, dust mites that die “considerately,/ leaving their exoskeletons to replace the polyester.” Requiem for a Doll gathers the strange and mismatched fragments, the things that have become unmade, and makes out of them a blessing: “May every dress be your favorite midnight/ blue…  each shoe nestled gently/ with its mate… / a pair of small warm hands/ that will never set you down.”

—Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press)

In Requiem for a Doll Ellie White guides us through the surreal landscape of girlhood to sexual awakening. These startling poems read like small blood offerings; they swell with visceral candor and fang-sharp awareness assuring us readers that beauty, too, can be inherited from all we have lost.

—Rachel McKibbens, author of Pink Elephant (Cypher Books, 2009) and Into the Dark and Emptying Field (Small Doggies Press, 2013).