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.*
--from "One Glass Negative"
A Doll for Throwing takes its title from the Bauhaus artist Alma
Siedhoff-Buscher's Wurfpuppe, a flexible and durable woven doll that,
if thrown, would land with grace. A ventriloquist is also said to
"throw" her voice into a doll that rests on the knee. Mary Jo Bang's
prose poems in this fascinating book create a speaker who had been a
part of the Bauhaus school in Germany a century ago and who had also
seen the school's collapse when it was shut by the Nazis in 1933. Since
this speaker is not a person but only a construct, she is also equally
alive in the present and gives voice to the conditions of both time
periods: nostalgia, xenophobia, and political extremism. The life of the
Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy echoes across these poems--the end of
her marriage, the loss of her negatives, and her effort to continue to
make work and be known for having made it.
