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

The Doll’s Alienation*

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

The Desires of Dolls

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

A Wonderful Experience

Litany

Incompatibility

Stop That

Four Visitations

Dolls Dolls Dolls*

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.
Cover image Copyright 2007 Matthew Feyld.

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.