Coming in September!
Updated: Jan 16, 2020
by Tanya Grae
Tanya Grae’s Undoll is a debut poetry collection that explores the ways we can be confined—by image, society, tradition—how we often play roles for ourselves, for others. Experimenting through form and rhythm, Grae’s brave personal quartet examines how damage has an origin often lost along the way. Part coming of age, part battle cry, Undoll, whether viewed as a noun, an adjective, or a verb, points to nonconforming, that the received role can be unzipped and left behind.
Book Design: Alban Fischer
Advanced Praise for Undoll
In this deft and restless oeuvre on the enigma that is woman, Tanya Grae displays an expressive narrative mastery that's unusual in a debut. These resolute stanzas are alternately fierce and tender, served up with an addictive skill that inspires awe and roots the reader in stories so many of us are afraid to tell.
-Patricia Smith
In Undoll, Tanya Grae draws on a multitude of clear images and cultural references to steady the roiling emotional drama underlying her poems. For her fortunate readers, the result is a mixture of literary artistry and human cries of desire, disappointment, and anger. This poet has found a new way to combine a lively, educated mind with the naked reality of the body.
-Billy Collins
Tanya Grae’s Undoll offers us a world where “every choice goes on forever,” “everywhere holds a mirror,” and “our whole is/ a fractal of everything.” Here mothers, daughters, and husbands possess a mirror’s unnerving ability not only to reflect but also to distort. Grae writes with such aptness of metaphor, such clarity of vision, that she reminds us, too, of the pleasures a mirror can hold: the seemingly endless iterations of the self, the capacity for transformation, and, yes, an abundance of light.
-Maggie Smith
About Tanya Grae
Tanya Grae's debut collection of poems, Undoll, was a National Poetry Series finalist. Her work has appeared inAmerican Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, New Ohio Review, Post Road, Poets.org, among other literary journals. The recipient of several awards, including two Academy of American Poets Prizes and the Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, she holds an MFA in poetry and fiction from Bennington College. She lives in Tallahassee and teaches at Florida State University while finishing her PhD.
As a reader whose attention only comes in ten-minute gaps between care shifts, the quartet’s arc assumes a continuity I don’t get; I meet “every choice goes on forever” in scraps. My tabs are Tanya Grae’s “unzipped and left behind” and, weirdly, what my kid’s Pokemon cards might be worth—both need more than fragments.
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https://casinoraskuttak.com has a way of making performance feel automatic, so Grae’s idea that identity can become a script imposed from outside felt unexpectedly familiar. The thought that hurt starts somewhere and then the starting point gets buried stuck with me, since I’ve watched people hold onto a label long after forgetting who first handed it to them. It makes me curious how the shifts in form and rhythm turn that shedding into something active rather than just described.
If Undoll can be noun, adjective, and verb, does the quartet make the verb sense audible through rhythm alone, or is “every choice goes on forever” only a thematic echo? I’ve tried a few of the top AI tools for line edits to compare drafts, and I still can’t hear the branching—maybe the forms resist it.