Dolls

Poems that address the pain caused by gender stereotypes and racial oppression in the American South. Claire Millikin’s poetry collection, Dolls, stages a confrontation of gendered and racial oppression. Working through the motif of the doll, the poems interrogate femininity in the traditional culture of the South, where damaging structures of gender and race are upheld. Millikin centers the book on an elegy for Sage Smith, an African American trans woman who disappeared from Charlottesville in 2012. Through the recurring figure of the doll—an ultra-femme figure who is frozen, damaged, silenced—Millikin protests the conditions of sexism in the area she was born in, offering poised responses to the wound of injustice that still shapes the region. With a reflective introduction by poet and scholar Sean Frederick Forbes, Dolls presents a harsh look at the price of traditional femininity. 

About the Author :
Claire Millikin is the author of seven books of poetry, including After Houses: Poetry for the Homeless, Tartessos and Other Cities, and Ransom Street, also published by 2Leaf Press. She has taught at the University of Maine Farmington and at the University of Virginia, and she holds a research fellowship at Princeton. Under the name of Claire Raymond, she publishes scholarship focusing on issues of race, gender, and decolonizing theory. Her scholarly books include Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South and Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics.   

Review :
"In DOLLS, Claire Millikin stuns us with her breathtaking poems that address the plight of the silenced Southern woman. In 'Dolls of Tifton, Georgia, ' she writes that 'Their silence is from everlasting.' Haunted, layered with shadows, and elegiac, Millikin's poems balance the truth-telling speaker with the uneasiness of the topic of the violent suppression of women, these urgently elegant poems 'do not speak in psalm but in elegy.'" Kathleen Ellis, author of Vanishing Act (2007) and Outer-Body Travel (2017) "In these historic (let us hope) days of racial reckoning, Claire Millikin's DOLLS brings the life of Sage Smith into the spotlight. While the media hounds after the latest white female victim, with social media upping the pulse, here the forgotten life of a disappeared Black trans woman is on full view as the Tragedy it is. An act of courage and political responsibility, DOLLS pushes art into the corners where journalism refuses to go, painting a vivid picture of the violence that stalked Sage Smith every day of her life, and ultimately her vanishing. Perhaps poetry can be a way of resurrection. Holding this book is holding a life." Bob Holman, poet, professor, activist, promoter, founder of Bowery Poetry and Bowery Arts + Science