Small Porcelain Head by Allison Benis White

Small Porcelain Head Reviews

• 
  Ellie

  
  Small Porcelain Head by
  Allison Benis White is a collection of powerful prose poems. They circle around death, suicide, and use a doll as the surrogate object. I felt sad, angry, and breathless, as well as astonished by their beauty.
• 
  Patricia Murphy

  Before reading this new collection, I went back to Self-Portrait with Crayon to refresh my memory about this poet's outstanding finesse. How can a book of poems make a reader like me (who is greedy and fast and impatient) slow down and breath and swallow and savor? I don't know how she does it.
  
  There were so many quiet and tender moments--wise moments I would call them--but never wise-pedantic. The book is about a suicide (I'm writing a book about my mother's multiple failed suicide attempts) and so it's very helpful for me to see how White so carefully avoids being loud. My poems are super loud. But then again, so was my mother, and her attempts were her loudest moments.
  
  I'll use a phrase from one of the poems here to express what works so well: "Because she can only move inches at a time, it is a small story."
  
  As with many of the poems, the line is referring to both the doll and the suicide. The poems excel at finding the key small details in a big small story, making it crystallize as a collection.
  
  This book gives me something I needed to remember today: even the most dramatic of gestures is made up of small movements.
  
  Here are some more lines that stayed with me:
  
  "Once I thought
  what could happen was only what I could
  imagine."
  
  "Even the violence is sentimental."
  
  "I want to die then
  decide."
  
  "My hair grows longer and longer, trying to
  leave."
  
  "To make dolls out of death
  is to make children."
  
• 
  Jeff

  These prose sentences have much the breathing spareness and solidity of her first ekphrastic prose book Self Portrait With Crayon, and indeed, the first book allows these to be already readable as a Self Portrait as Mechanical Miniatures. They are ekphrastic, they see the objets d'art as figures a poem makes. They offer a delicate and enchanting movement into self-troping. They are if anything slightly more at home in their linguistic procedures than in the debut, so slightly less uncanny. Nonetheless they continue to make a virtue of their procedure.
• 
  Erica Wright

  These troubling, sparse poems are a satisfying follow-up to White's wonderful debut collection, Self-Portrait with Crayon.
• 
  Abigail Munson

  I enjoyed this collection the doll imagery was a little over played but it served its purpose. White's prose poems are fragile, sad, mechanic and pretty. My favorite poems were: Please forgive me, Even the violence, What we end up with, This the gift of violence, How the Stillness, Twins in red silk, Or lost teeth, Then the relief, and We call the denial of stillness. Look forward to reading more of her stuff.
• 
  Anatoly Molotkov

  "As a child, I pressed my tongue to my wrist/ to see what it would be like to feel some-/one. // What should I do with my mind? Think/ of the way it broke until the breaking is/ language." So is building, as Allison Benis White impressively demonstrates in this poetic hallucination, this eerie and delirious song of grief and mortality.
• 
  Amanda Moore

  Such clarity of purpose, such beautifully tight prose poems, such haunting and obsessive imagery. I devoured this book.
• 
  Vincent Scarpa

  After having fallen deeply in love with Please Bury Me in This and even more so with Allison after interviewing her, I quickly purchased her two previous collections. That I have lived this long without having ABW's words in my life is an error, and one I'm glad to have corrected.
  
  “What should I do with my mind? Think of the way it broke until the breaking is language.”
  
  “If I could tell you everything now with the fluency of dying—I am not what happened to me. Including the body, at the right temperature, everything melts into the conclusion of myth.”
  
• 
  Kimberly

  This collection had some great lines & images, though I did feel confused at times about the vertical narrative that linked them & whether my explicit understanding of it was key to really 'getting' the poems/book. I felt that what I chose to get out of them, in the end though, was sufficient to my ability to enjoy the collection for the most part.
• 
  Santino

  A simple, but powerful, collection of prose poems. Thoroughly recommend.
• 
  Cheryl

  A dark, powerful collection