A genre-defying debut that distills memoir, cultural criticism, and poetic inquiry into a kaleidoscopic meditation on motherhood, memory, art, and transformation.
“City of Toys is a beautiful and masterful work of obsessions, the essays stunning in their focus and in how they accumulate. There is a universe built within every piece, with handfuls of connective threads, and they are woven together brilliantly.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
“These essays are brisk, hilarious, canny, and full of life. Nothing about Jenike’s genre-bending writing is replicable. A finely researched, ruminative, and looping feast of a book, City of Toys makes the vastness of its knowledge, its fine bursts of understanding, and the deep well of its wisdom seem easy.” —Mary Cappello
Composed in a postpartum blur and finessed as Lesley Jenike settled into established motherhood, the essays in City of Toys careen from exteriority to interiority, from high to low culture, and from the manufactured to the natural world, all on a quest to understand creativity, mothering, and how art drives and shapes us. With madcap acuity, Jenike casts her eye on cultural flash points from Harambe the gorilla to Steven Spielberg and Ada Lovelace to Yayoi Kusama. At times she doubles back to her own experience as a young performer, and at others hurtles into her children’s possible futures, when AI starts to dream, imagination is commodified, and the polar bear drowns. All the while she wonders what we owe our children and what we believe (rightly or wrongly) our children owe us. Fascinated by creativity and peopled by dolls, automatons, robots, ghosts, puppets, and historical figures, this exuberant and devastating debut asks, What world are we building, and what are we tearing down?
Lesley Jenike has published poetry, creative nonfiction, and criticism in Image, West Branch, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing, literature, and philosophy at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Contents
Lavender: An Overture
I. Puppets, Doll Babies, Automatons
Stargate
Maybe It’s Just Show Biz
Calliope
The Teaching Emotion
Enter Time, the Chorus
II. Enfant Terribles, Prodigies, Old Souls
The Birthmark
The Positioning Field
Black Heart
Exit, Pursued by a Bear
It’s a Story, I Just Didn’t Realize It
III. Fairies, Shape-Shifters, Will o’-the-Wisps
You Figure It Out
Be Whole in Me Now Here
Go Hide and I’ll Count to Ten
The Pupil
The Cottingley Fairies, Revisited (a Mostly-Fiction)
The Haunting of Ill House
The Goodbye Door
IV. Artifacts, Artworks, and Other Playthings
In the Again Time
Wunderkammer
Hearth Goddess and Hollow on the Inside
Make the Best of an Emergency
The Moribund, or Salacious Fragments of a Rather Regular Life Made of Weather and Stuff and Walks and Tasks
Coda: An Alary Breviary
Acknowledgments
