Cover Art: Invisiblesk
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 104 pages
September 16, 2019, ISBN 978-1-936919-53-6
About Tanya Grae
Tanya Grae is the debut author of Undoll (YesYes Books, 2019), winner of the Julie Suk Award for Best Poetry Book Published by a Literary Press and a Florida Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, her awards also include a Kingsbury Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Kerouac House residency, and the Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa. Her poems and essays appear in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2019, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Tallahassee and is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University.
Undoll by Tanya Grae
Book Awards for Undoll by Tanya Grae!
2019 Julie Suk Award, Best Poetry Book by a Literary Press
2019 Florida Book Award Medalist
About Undoll
Part coming of age, part battle cry, Tanya Grae’s debut collection explores the many roles women play, for themselves, for others, and traces one woman’s struggle to emerge from a marriage and transform herself, while navigating the expectations and personal histories of four matrilineal generations and feminism, as well as American Southern culture. Grae’s brave quartet suggests the epicenter of trauma, however far in the past, can continue to undermine the present. Undoll, whether viewed as a noun, an adjective, or a verb, points to nonconforming, that the received role can be unzipped and left behind.
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
Undoll is an undertow of body, mind, and spirit roots that peel all the whispered spaces and places raw and exposed. This debut of poetry un-hushes intimate justice and offers a new juxtaposition of mother, baby, daughter, girl, barbie, lover, wife, witch or bitch, and a good face.'"
- Jaki Shelton Green, Final Judge Juli Suk Award
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
