Boxes

From Dollhouse

By Elaine Terranova

 

The dollhouse is a box
like most things,
a tooth, a heart, a tomb.
Cloud glory crowns it
or it is maybe struck
by eyeball-shaped hail.
At dusk, the earth's shadow
falls over it.  The dollhouse
is an ecosystem with
a fixed population.
Their wool-strand hair.
Their wooden feet.
They find themselves
stretched out on the sofa
or folded into a chair
by a window,
gaze directed out.
Gabled and balconied
the dollhouse clings
like a shoe.  A refuge
is what it is.
A destination.
Even the smallest
can say the address.

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Off The Grid Press is pleased to announce that the winner of our 2012 manuscript contest is Elaine Terranova’s Dollhouse. 

This new poetry collection by Whitman Award winner Terranova is her sixth, and it is breathtaking.  In pellucid language the poet walks through a kind of “vale of soul making” by re-visioning hours she spent as a child playing dolls with a friend.  Terranova weaves her poetics of space by setting the fragile orders of the dollhouse against the realities of family fiction and the terror of a whole world outside where no shelter can be found – all this in exquisite, minimalist music.