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

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]…