Requiem for a Doll

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