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Book Description

Winner in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards, Luanne Castle’s debut poetry collection, Doll God, studies traces of the spirit world in human-made and natural objects–a Japanese doll, a Palo Verde tree, a hummingbird. Her exploration leads the reader between the twin poles of nature and creations of the imagination in dolls, myth, and art. From the first poem, which reveals the child’s wish to be godlike, to the final poem, an elegy for female childhood, this collection echoes with the voices of the many in the a walking doll, a murderer, Snow White. Marriage, divorce, motherhood, and family losses set many of the poems in motion. The reader is transported from the lakes of Michigan to the Pacific Ocean to the Sonoran Desert. These gripping poems take the reader on a journey through what is found, lost, or destroyed. The speaker in one poem insists, «I am still looking for angels.» She has failed to find them yet keeps searching on. She knows that what is lost can be found.

Excerpts

Hemmed In

Fabrication in more ways

than one, Penelope

minting pennies from tin.

 

Whoever heard of an artist

creating a blue streak all day

only to reverse

the process and destroy it under the moon.

 

Let us assume there was no

shroud, sacheted, folded

long before under the linens in the left

bottom drawer. No

interlacing funerary threads, she


hemmed instead, edging anything

her women brought, needle-roughened

fingers commanding handkerchiefs,

blankets, robes, turning down and stitching

up each item, silent as a household god.

###

Chimera

Outside the window,

the palm spikes ruffle.

The sun has passed its peak

My muscles pent, crouched

to spring, I enter the outdoors.

Bird whistles amidst

the rustle of tree silks. They

still. Gusts bring word

from the wash: javelina--

 
Their buffalo heads,

spear teeth, appear down

the arroyo. They pick their way

as if on wobbling heels, pass

under me and the bridge. When

the monsoon river rises

I will remember. Closer

than natural, we share

something which floats

and is momentarily precise.

It has no symbol, no reflection

on a copper plate.

© Luanne Castle

Praise for Doll God

“Every day the world subtracts from itself,” Luanne Castle observes.  Her wonderfully titled collection, Doll God, with its rich and varied mix of poems part memoir, part myth and tale, shimmers as it swims as poetry is meant to, upstream against the loss. —Stuart Dybek, MacArthur Fellow and author of Streets in Their Own Ink

In her haunting first collection, Luanne Castle has created a space where “the sounds/of the schoolchildren/and the traffic/grind down/to nothing” and where the reader is invited to experience the lasting echo of our primal human past. Who makes our toys, and why? Which toys and in whose likeness?  With startling imagery and a keen eye for the subtler shapes of violence and redemption, Castle asks us to consider and re-consider these questions. Like a “world of broken mirrors waiting” the poems call us back to ourselves, our childhoods, and the potential rewards of prayer and reflection. I find both hope and despair in these pages, where “every day the world subtracts from itself and nothing/is immune,” and every object contains a voice and a story. This is a fierce and beautiful book. —Caroline Goodwin, author of Trapline

Luanne Castle’s new collection, Doll God, is sublime.  The manner of these poems– that they embrace the doll and bring to it humanity and divinity–is something to behold.  The voice in these poems is tender, visceral, and wonderfully human.  Ms. Castle has forged a vision that feels like something you want to dance with, dress up, talk to like a child, but with an adult’s sensibility.  I love these poems with my whole heart because they make me feel both childlike and grown, simultaneously.  Doll mistresses, primordial conches, Barbies, infuse these poems with tremendous humanity, and they delight with purpose, sadness and joy, and an incredible range that will leave you breathless. —Matthew Lippman, author of American Chew

A Review of Doll God by Elizabeth Gauffreau

Doll God, Luanne Castle’s award-winning debut poetry collection, can best be described in terms of the water imagery that appears throughout. Some poems lap at the lakeshore of sensory experience, while others plumb the ocean depths of metaphor.

A prominent theme in the collection is the nature of artistic inspiration, in all its mystery, nuance, and, at times, pain…. (Please go HERE to read the rest of the review.)

Available on Amazon on Paperback

Author Biography

Luanne Castle lives in Arizona, next to a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare. She has published two full-length poetry collections, Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press 2022), a Book Excellence Award Winner, and Doll God (Kelsay Books 2015), which won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Her chapbooks are Our Wolves (Alien Buddha Press 2023), First Runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Award, and Kin Types (Finishing Line Press 2017), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Luanne’s Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, Your Impossible Voice, Gooseberry Pie, Bending Genres, Bull, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cleaver, Disappointed Housewife, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, Pleiades, American Journal of Poetry, The Mackinaw, Thimble, One Art, Lothlorien, River Teeth, MasticadoresUSA, Storyteller Poetry Journal, TAB, and other journals. Her Best of the Net-nominated mixed-media art has been showcased at Watershed Review, Wildscape, Mad Swirl, Raw Lit, and Thimble. Luanne blogs at Writer Site.