This genre-bending collection is a Barbie Bible for the Disenchanted. Riccio’s philosophical reflections, historical, sociological and personal verses… create a playhouse fit for kings, queens, misfits, and lost souls who can’t wait to revolt against the tyrannical capitalist system that favours the strong over the weak, the young and pretty over the over-the-hillers.

Moving between Plato’s cave and Plastic’s world of appearances, these eloquent and trenchant poems chronicle the history and aftermath of the “living doll” we know as Barbie… Plato may have banished the poet from his Republic, but in Plastic’s Republic, the poet returns with a vengeance to reminisce—with no trace of nostalgia—and then to recraft Barbie’s story with both confident elegance and daring resourcefulness.

If Mattel masterminded, in 1959, a bitch-goddess of a doll, with breasts that are accoutrements for, and arched feet that are no impediments to, High Fashion, so now does Giovanna Riccio apply her own unconditional critique-in-verse, to break Barbie out of the mummification of her marketing but also out of the stagnant, feminist pontificating that sees her as standing as fallible as a pawn.

Riccio answers the “plastication” of femininity with her own sardonic feminism, her own Platonic panache, to remind us that, within the beatific toy, there is unseen bleeding, an invisible vagina, and that Barbie is so iconic a symbol that some human beings play dress up–via plastic surgery–to become as “perfect” as is she. Still others, poignantly solitary, address their amorous thighs to the sullen cavities of sex dolls.