Preface

By Robin Ekiss b. 1969 Robin Ekiss

I was raised in the company of dolls.

My mother, the miniaturist,

made pies the size of thumbnails.

My father, the shadowboxer,

talked only to the dark.

No one here remembers

the love of a chair for its ottoman

or the privacy of a shut door.

Windows grieve in their sashes.

They burn with interior light,

like blood oranges.

Imagine: a dollhouse in every room—

in every room, another room,

in every girl, another girl

looking out a tiny window,

her face repeated on the glass.

As two who could not pretend

to love each other,

we stared through grief.

Pupil, poupée, little doll

orphaned by the iris of my eye:

what did you see, what did you see

but that other girl in me,

the door to whose post was nailed

the smallest coffin,

hiding the name of God inside

like the rust in the mouth.

Source: The Mansion of Happiness (University of Georgia Press, 2009)

Biography

Robin Ekiss is the author of the poetry collection The Mansion of Happiness (2009). A resident of San Francisco, she received a 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Emerging Women Writers and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University. Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, VQR, TriQuarterly, and Best New Poets 2007 from Samovar Press.

Ekiss’s poems . . .

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