76 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Women Authors | Social Studies / Literature - Folklore
With lush imagery and surprising syntactical turns, the poems in Doll Apollo merge mythology with close attention to the patterns, colors, and contours of the material world. Through the figure of the paper doll, the hoax conspiracy surrounding the Apollo moon landing, and lyrics embedded with violence and beauty, Melissa Ginsburg’s feminist ecopoetics weaves the domestic and celestial into considerations of female identity, desire, spiritual yearning, and doubt. Throughout, Doll Apollo remains rooted in scenery and music, as Ginsburg embraces her subjects with humor and verbal and formal play.
Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost and the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, West Branch, Fence, the Southwest Review, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi and serves as associate editor of Tupelo Quarterly.
“The poems in Doll Apollo chart a fascinating constellation of emotional and spiritual intricacy. Melissa Ginsburg’s virtuosic lines sift the fragments of our seemingly divided societal moment to find luminous and enduring connections between technology and faith, mythology and modernity. This book is a marvel of beauty and deep vision.”—Kiki Petrosino
“Melissa Ginsburg’s Doll Apollo attends to surfaces, repetitions, threads. The pastoral landscape and the pastoral tradition in poetry overlap and tug at one another: Daphne pulling in one direction, Apollo in another. One of them is part tree and therefore part paper, folded notes, garlands, cutout snowflakes. The other is part sun and therefore part spacecraft, lunar landing vehicle, fuel-spent rocket stage. They are tethered together, bound to repeat like a scene printed on fabric, both becoming and disappearing at the same time, complicating and unraveling.”—D. A. Powell
“Doll Apollo is a book of solutions—the poems do not ignore the problem of their own fluency, but neither do they compromise. Their beauty is the inevitable beauty of achieved art. These poems answer the reader’s perennial hope.”—Shane McCrae
“These poems are brilliant-cut crystal, refracting both light and facts. Tip them slightly and watch meaning quiver and split. This is joyous attention. Ginsburg’s is a dreamy book you’ll want to fold yourself into again and again.”—Claire Wahmanholm
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