Elaine Terranova Wins Off the Grid Press Prize

Goddard graduate Elaine Terranova’s poetry collection Dollhouse has won the Off the Grid Press 2012 Manuscript Contest.

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This new poetry collection by Whitman Award winner Terranova is her sixth, and it is breathtaking.  In pellucid language the poet walks through a kind of “vale of soul making” by re-visioning hours she spent as a child playing dolls with a friend.  Terranova weaves her poetics of space by setting the fragile orders of the dollhouse against the realities of family fiction and the terror of a whole world outside where no shelter can be found – all this in exquisite, minimalist music.

From Dollhouse
By Elaine Terranova

The dollhouse is a box
like most things,
a tooth, a heart, a tomb.
Cloud glory crowns it
or it is maybe struck
by eyeball-shaped hail.
At dusk, the earth’s shadow
falls over it.  The dollhouse
is an ecosystem with
a fixed population.
Their wool-strand hair.
Their wooden feet. …[Keep Reading]…