A Doll for Throwing: Poems (2017) by Mary Jo Bang

A Doll for Throwing: Poems (2017) Reviews

• 
  kirsten

  Screw you Gropius and the same to the mansplainers.
• 
  Christa Van

  Carefully read for poetry month, I had to look up more information about this book to understand the subject and intent. Very interesting creative way to give voice to an artist run out of Germany before the war. She was a member of the Bauhaus school and found it difficult to reclaim her work after the war. I enjoyed reading but still have very low abilities to interpret and understand poetry.
• 
  Rocio Notario Aceituno

  Último libro leído y en este caso se trata de un poemario de prosa poética que gané en un concurso que hizo @sra_bibliotecaria gracias a la editorial @kriller71
  El poemario está bien y es entretenido y además he podido practicar mi inglés porque los poemas vienen en español e inglés.
  El libro tiene 144 páginas y 55 poemas
  Entre esquirlas biográficas y alusiones a fotografías, cobran forma no sólo una heterodoxa recreación de vida y época, sino también, una lúcida reflexión alrededor de temas como la identidad, el género y el extremismo político. En el centenario de la Escuela de la Bauhaus, Mary Jo Bang nos ofrece este necesario y reivindicativo reconocimiento a una fotógrafa que ha sido silenciada por la historia.
  #librosjunio #libros2019 #maryjobang #unamuñecaparatirar #kriller71ediciones
• 
  Terry Pitts

  The title for Mary Jo Bang's book of poetry comes from a soft type of doll designed in the 1920s by the Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. (Examples of the doll can be seen at
  at the Bauhaus website.) The doll (or wurfpuppe in German), with fiber body and wooden head, was meant to be safely tossed between children, but in Bang's book this takes on an entirely different meaning. A Doll for Throwing is a kind of elegy for Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), the Austrian artist who met and married the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy in 1920, shortly before he became one of the legendary professors at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany. In 1933, she had to immediately flee Germany one day, leaving her negatives in the care of Moholy-Nagy, from whom she had been divorced. When he himself became an emigre, he turned the negatives over for safekeeping to the famous German architect and founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, who proceeded to use Lucia's photographs for decades without crediting her. She began
  a long correspondence to try to regain her negatives from him.
  
  The poems are written as prose texts and many are titled after photographs by Lucia (or other Bauhaus-related artists). The particular rectangular shape of the poem is based on the shape of the original photograph, reinforcing the theme of Lucia's stolen images. These are smart poems that deal playfully with topics like photography, history, and sexism. ("Who hasn't felt that in order to breathe, she has to splinter the first self and leave it behind? I constructed a second self. I photographed myself as if I were a building.") Many, if not all, of the poems can be read as if in the voice of Lucia Moholy, although this is not made clear in the book. Anyone interested in the Bauhaus will find the poems of additional levels of interest.
  
  One poem mimics the format of various resumes found in Lucia's file at the Bauhaus:
  
  "First name, last name, studied subject, and also subject. Was employed as something by various. Was married to and with him went somewhere when. When the something moved to somewhere in date, she began to do something. In due course she did something, as well as something..."
• 
  Karena Bakas

  Definitely high brow. Helps to know about the Bauhaus movement in 1930s Berlin, especially photography.
• 
  anna

  textually rich and challenging.
• 
  Charlie

  While these poems were quite good, I think they would be improved even more if they were in a visual edition that included the artworks frequently being conjured and mediated by the individual text blocks.
• 
  Emily

  I found the poem, The Possessive Form, resonated with me the most from this collection.
• 
  Cate

  This book was like a dream and a nightmare.
• 
  Gary D

  I hereby commit to rereading this book in its entirety. It deserves at least that.
• 
  mat3rialg3rl

  “we are post-then but still attached.” 🫗 + bisexual flowers
• 
  abhinaya

  brilliant and challenging
• 
  Courtney LeBlanc

  A collection of prose poems about the life and art of Lucia Moholy.
  
  from On the Balcony of the Building: "There's no sleeping now. No morphia dream- / pact with night as a needle. We are staying / awake and pressing against one another as if / whatever is left is all that will ever be."
  
  from Gesture Dance Diagram: "We're young and some of / us won't last. Although who can say that when / is or where why? Please don't tell me tomorrow / is already over."
• 
  Jovi

  En verdad leí "Teoría de la catástrofe", antología de Mary Jo Bang editada y traducida por Zindo & Gafuri, en castellano argento.