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Tom Whalen’s manuscript “Dolls” was chosen by Denise Duhamel as the winning entrant in the 2006 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. It is a rigorous study in creep, adrift on surrealist tangents through various biological, artificial, and supernatural apertures, tidily catalogued into paragraphic bow-wrapped boxes—all limbs secured in their plastic and porcelain sockets while the eyes drop out and roll off the shelf. The tight and careful clip of Whalen’s prose traps will pull you in again and again, even as the wretched dilemmas of his violated, disused playthings repeatedly threaten to frighten you away. Once opened, the book cannot be put down so much as violently torn to pieces—“dismembered, beheaded, and burned,” as Whalen might say—and we mean this as the highest of praises. Matthew Feyld’s cover image, of a person-thing quite dolly yet not quite doll, is just one resident of an entire world of disproportionately-formed “guys and gals” that seems to grow on an almost daily basis; be sure to have a swim there, too. [links marked * courtesy of Ghoti] Belief From the Life of the Doll The Doll Performs Surgery The Test The Strange Doll The Doll Writes to Her Mother Instructions on How to Wind a Doll Little Tale of Decency Romanticism and Dolls Obsession The Origins of Dolls Once a Doll Was Exploring Her Intestines* On Love and Dolls Dolls and Kant The Doll’s Suicide In an Antique Shop Window The Tenacity of Dolls Woman and Dolls All This Incompatibility Stop That Four Visitations A True Story The Doll on the Threshold of Liberty The Last Word on Dolls 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. And His Bucket of Parts: “A Doll’s Tale” and “The Delusions of Dolls,” two “doll” poems which were not included in the final chapbook manuscript, are available at Double Room. |
Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing you, reader, the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop. Our goals are for each issue of our journal to submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters, young masses of tentacular foci undulating as directed (in all, at once) by our eclectic stable of contributors; for each new book to seduce and ensnare you, sometimes intangibly, always undeniably; and for you, reader, to be able to draw at least one passage from our banks that prods your mind with a precision and power that feels as if it was written for your eyes alone. To wit and to whet, here is a snippet, a slight nip of our delicious lit mix: New and Upcoming afterpastures, by Claire Hero Caketrain Issue 05 Loving 5_Trope, AGNI, Barrow Street, Believer, Black Warrior, Born, Bound Off, Caffeine Destiny, Canarium, Conjunctions, Controlled Burn, Diagram, Double Room, Drunken Boat, Elimae, FC2, Finishing Line, Fishouse, Flood, Found, Fringe, Frostproof, Future Tense, Ghoti, Harpur Palate, Hobart, Jubilat, Mad Hatters’, Many Mountains Moving, Mid-American, NewPages, New Yinzer, New York Tyrant, Nidus, Nightboat, Noon, Obscure, Parsifal, Pebble Lake, PENNsound, Pudding House, Quick Fiction, Rattapallax, Redactions, Salt, SleepingFish, Spinning Jenny, Starcherone, Steel City Review, Titular, Ubu, Unicorn Mountain, Unsaid, Web del Sol Mourning 3rd Bed, Alterran, Deek, Melic, Press 62
Copyright 2003-2008 Caketrain Journal and Press. Rights to individual works revert to their respective creators. ISSN 1547-6839. How’s Our Driving? Into Befriending Trains? Hosting by Doteasy |