Tom Whalen’s manuscript “Dolls” was chosen by Denise Duhamel as the winning entrant in the 2006 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. It is a study in creep, adrift on surrealist tangents through biological, artificial, and supernatural apertures, tidily catalogued into paragraphic bow-wrapped boxes. The careful clip of Whalen’s prose traps will pull you in, even his violated playthings threaten to frighten you away. Once opened, the book cannot be put down so much as “dismembered, beheaded, and burned,” as Whalen might say—and we mean this as the highest of praises.
Acknowledgements
Another Chicago Magazine: “From the Life of the Doll”; Gargoyle: “Incompatibility,” “In an Antique Shop Window”; Ghoti Magazine: “Dolls Dolls Dolls,” “The Doll’s Alienation,” “Once a Doll Was Exploring Her Intestines”; Mississippi Review: “A True Story,” “All This,” “Woman and Dolls”; Poetic Inhalation: “The Lover of Dolls”; Sentence: “The Tenacity of Dolls,” “Belief,” “The Test,” “Instructions on How to Wind a Doll,” “Romanticism and Dolls,” “On Love and Dolls,” “Dolls and Kant,” “The Doll’s Suicide,” “The Last Word on Dolls”; The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (Paul Rosheim, Ed.; Obscure Publications, 2004): “All This,” “The Doll Performs Surgery,” “The Doll Writes to Her Mother,” “Obsession,” “The Origin of Dolls,” “Four Visitations.” Text Copyright 2007 Tom Whalen. Cover image Copyright 2007 Matthew Feyld.