Nothing can look, feel, be broken and perhaps be mended like a doll that is not a doll.

Stanley Cavell

How can a doll be a force of nature? Only if her plastic, paralyzed head conceals a masterplot.

Wayne Koestenbaum

§

Recently, by a slip-road off the A14 (junction 16, for Huntingdon), there was, nestled in the long grass as if cradled, a doll. It had a porcelain body and a broken face, and it gazed up at the trucks droning metronomically past.

CONTINUE READING OPENS IN PDF CRC

Cal Revely-Calder lives in Cambridge. He co-edits the experimental poetry/prose magazine Charlatan Works, and is a contributing editor at the Cambridge Humanities Review. His writing has also turned up in 3:AM, Prac Crit, and Blackbox Manifold.

Image: Doll heads, Mahalie Stackpole, Creative Commons