Small Porcelain Head
Muriel Rukeyser said of poetry: "We wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along." That's how White's book felt to me. Her poems that use dolls to embody the awful stillness of loss were intimates of my own grief. And she wrote about it with such tenderness, intelligence, and clarity that I understood my own losses better...Perhaps I should just say get thee to a bookstore or library. Buy it for your friends, your family, your enemies, your neighbors, or steal their copies, but read it.--The Rumpus (The Last Book I Loved)A doll's "small porcelain head" may seem like a frangible thing, but in White's mysterious, moving collection, delicately envisioned but indestructibly wrought, dolls are solidly there--able to "dance violently/ without the threat of consummation or injury." It's humans who are breakable, tentative, and open to anguish, as evidenced by one haunting figure whose suicide note ends the collection--Library Journal (Best Poetry 2013)White's new collection is a book-length elegy for a suicide...Like the angst Shelley's Victor Frankenstein finds in his creature, White's speaker would uncover in her doll the voice of a dark, existential despair. Instead of bringing the dead to life, however, White's speaker wants something less theatrical, though no less ambitious: to bear witness to the narrative of her friend's agony --The Kenyon ReviewReaders may find that they return toSmall Porcelain Headagain and again...the meditations and images ameliorate each read, become more potent and insightful.--32 PoemsThe poems inSmall Porcelain Headpossess a power that is at once mythically, even atavistically childlike, and also unsettlingly adult in its post-Lapsarian consciousness...The dolls, of course, provide a way of writing about God, nada -- whatever it is that does not talk back even to our most violent wishing -- and to explore what the speaker can/must make of that brokenness. "If description is a living thing," White writes, "dark cherry hair and glass eyes, tilted away--I want to say something that will look at me."--Los Angeles Review of BooksWhite's poems are about so much more than one person's suicide...they are poems of woodworking and glassworks, of painting and construction, of working with the hands because the mind is breaking.--The Iowa ReviewWhite's attention to detail while offering abstract discussions of time, grief, and mortality is truly stunning. Presented in prose vignettes, the book creates a readerly expectation of wholeness, a coherent narrative, and a sense of resolution, which the poet works to undermine...It is this discontinuity between form and content that renders the work so profound.--Colorado Review