A Doll for Throwing: Poems
The exquisite new collection by the award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang, author of The Last Two Seconds and Elegy
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.
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"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
"Daring, direct, and always-surprising poetry. . . . A Doll for Throwing explores the political alongside the personal: nostalgia, xenophobia, and political extremism; art, marriage, and loss."--Bustle
"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)
"The philosophy guiding each [poem] along is so staggering--so sweeping--that I've found myself returning to it again and again."--Caitlin Youngquist, The Paris Review Staff Picks
"Many of these prose poems are dream-like, philosophical takes that require time and reflection. . . . Bang can make her narrators find the surreal moments from their pasts that ring curiously true."--The Millions
"[Mary Jo Bang] rocks the world with this unmatchable new book inspired by the "Bauhaus" movement. . . . These intriguing poems are sometimes pieces so we get the edge of a relationship, as memory works, or part of a prism. Breaking old forms to create new ones makes for robust writing. I'm not sure what the poet expected to do; but whatever it was she accomplished it--she's bringing it--perhaps for the future of poetry."--Washington Independent Review of Books
"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
"Coldly beautiful and relentlessly quotable."--Poets.org
"A Doll for Throwing is an exhumation of an archive. It is a Wunderkammer of image-poems dedicated to displaying people and things, circling back round to them from different angles with a photographer's eye."--Music & Literature
"Bang's impeccable collection reads as a 'circular mirror of the social order, ' reflecting the historicity of our current moment with wit, subtlety, and grace."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
