“Winning the Levis Prize was very fortunate. I’ve always loved Four Way Books and the extraordinary work they publish. And having Claudia Rankine choose my manuscript was an enormous gift. Frankly, I couldn’t have asked for a better press to publish Small Porcelain Head, and I’m so pleased that they’ve agreed to publish my third book as well, which is the key way winning this prize has opened up ‘new doors’ for me. To have a press stick with you and publish beyond the prize-winning manuscript is unfortunately rare.” Thanks for the love, Allison! Click here to read Niki Johnson’s interview with Allison Benis White (Small Porcelain Head) for Superstition Review. 

“What astonishes about this collection is White’s rigorous examination of her own project and process in poem-time, a refined flaying. Just as Bishop’s drafts attest to the codependence of emotional and aesthetic honesty, White asks herself, and us, the grave and necessary questions: ‘Is this the beauty to be made from suffering? Or is this just suffering, through witness, glorified?’” You can read Michelle Chan Brown’s full review of Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head in the Spring 2015 number 42 issue of Birmingham Poetry Review. 

"Initially I chose dolls as meditative objects because to me they represented both the newly dead body, and the act of caring for, talking to, holding a body one pretends is (still) alive. Specifically, the dolls were a way to act out and explore my grief and love, and to still be with my friend—and although she was an adult at the time of her death, the smallness of dolls helped me enter the maternal and childlike qualities grieving elicited." Read more of Emilia Phillips' interview with Allison Benis White (Small Porcelain Head) here. 

Small Porcelain Head is available from Four Way Books. 

Congratulations to Allison Benis White (Small Porcelain Head) on being a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Poetry!

Small Porcelain Head by Allison Benis White was voted as one of The Believer's "Readers' Favorite Works of Poetry in 2013". Click here for the full list of poetry and of fiction. 

Small Porcelain Head by Allison Benis White, published by Four Way Books in 2013, is a finalist for The Commonwealth Club of California’s 83rd Annual California Book Awards! Read the full list of finalists here. 

"White’s poems, however, are about so much more than one person’s suicide: they explore the complex ways we relate to life and death...they are poems of woodworking and glassworks, of painting and construction, of working with the hands because the mind is breaking." Read the full review by Claudia Cortese.

Small Porcelain Head by Allison Benis White is available from Four Way Books. 

"White’s new collection is a book-length elegy for a suicide—a friend—in which the repeated image of the doll becomes a treacherous object, a Janus-faced god, and an elegiac substitution trope that seems by turns personal and mythic. White’s poems are musical, obsessive, gestural, and stark, and they evince the author’s elliptical approach to a submerged narrative inflected with enigmatic, nearly symbolist signs." Read the full review here.