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Doll Studies

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Carol Guess

March 2012

Alyse Bensel

Doll Studies: Forensics, a collection of tightly woven prose poems, investigates a series of crime scene dioramas portrayed with dolls and doll sets. A strong, questioning voice describes and comments on each diorama from various perspectives, piecing together a narrative built from individual scenes. Through engaging, fine-tuned poems, Carol Guess leads the reader through the dramas and mysteries left behind and reenacted with these dolls, creating a strange yet fascinating glimpse into two artistic mediums playing off one another and commenting on human fault and tragedy.

Doll Studies: Forensics, a collection of tightly woven prose poems, investigates a series of crime scene dioramas portrayed with dolls and doll sets. A strong, questioning voice describes and comments on each diorama from various perspectives, piecing together a narrative built from individual scenes. Through engaging, fine-tuned poems, Carol Guess leads the reader through the dramas and mysteries left behind and reenacted with these dolls, creating a strange yet fascinating glimpse into two artistic mediums playing off one another and commenting on human fault and tragedy.

The voice of an overarching speaker narrates various poems, including the opening poem, “Aerial Rifle.” The speaker informs that

This dollhouse lesson has to do with time. I mean the way sound travels through a house asleep. Detectives learn to sweep a story clockwise for detail. Anyone might own a gun.

Short, punctuated sentences lend a quick, fragmented style to the speaker’s observations. In “What Wounds Us Starts As Gifts From Strangers,” the speaker renders a murder, commands the reader to know that

This case is retired because it’s too hard to solve, clues tucked away, invisible metal. To undo her death you have to undress her. The icebox flashes its numbered demands.

Perspective moves from omniscient and inquisitive speaker to inhabiting personas of the dolls and victims, which soon become interchangeable. In “When Dolls Love Dolls,” the speaker laments:

Nights, I curled into her back to dream, but when I turned she left me cold. Once she called me John. I’m Fred. I don’t know why she wanted speckled reindeer on the wall.

Other dolls are self-aware of their state, such as in “Annals of Dolls Ill-Formed,” where a doll claims while observing the artist at work: “Not every doll looks fine enough to die. Sometimes the scissors slip off her shoulders. Her clavicle caves, her neck dangles.” The doll goes on to confess: “With so much to do, she can’t love us all equally. My siblings and I compete to be burned. Now I’m a head on a pile, unseen among rivals vying to die.”

Macabre and tragic but with a sense of reverence for the work, the prose poems enact an only half-known narrative, the narrative of aftermath. Transfigured from visual to textual representation, the poems help the audience garner another understanding of these oftentimes gruesome scenes through an observant voice and detailed poetic craft.

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