“In Plastic’s Republic, Giovanna Riccio has penned a magnificent collection seamlessly incorporating true facts about the genesis of Barbie and her evolution as an iconic thought form in the lives of girls, women, men, America and the world, with results affecting our psychological, societal and ecological health.

Plastic’s Republic is our world, a shaped and reshaped plasticity of being, with plastic as the medium. The first section entitled Fore Word (play), merges the word foreplay with forward, brilliantly alluding to Barbie’s simultaneous image as a toy and sex symbol. This two-poem teaser prefaces the book with The Gift and Homemade Wine. These two pivotal poems set the stage for the poetry ahead by personalizing the poet’s quest for Barbie’s treasure, as well as her initiation into the Barbie world. In The Gift, the poet is one of the “two misfit children mining pop bottles, glint on glass sparking gold two-penny promises.” The dolls the poet coveted as a child, “fancied well-heeled lives in a world beyond my paltry stash/pricey girls who stranded me on this side of the television.”

The Barbie Suite, a title resonant with the Sugar Suite’s Sugar Plum Fairy, is a sequence of nine poems about the origin of Barbie and her evolution. In the Creation Myths, poems give the history of the doll’s beginnings, a story teeming with creativity, yet also injustice and treachery. Cut-throat Mattel founders Ruth and Elliot Handler used and eventually abused Jack Ryan’s creative genius and corporate expertise to create best-selling Mattel toys, of which one was Barbie. They virtually deposed Jack to death, by terminating him when they no longer needed him. History is written by the victor… so wise, reader, warns the poet, bear in mind that dollar for dollar, a collaborator can default to an adversary and devour the lesser rank.

We are shown Mattel as a self-serving, manipulative, money-making corporation. Paralleling Plato’s cave, Barbie, as the illusion of perfect femininity, is accessible in a basement rec-room, chained to wood paneled walls by neck and legs… accessible via a pristine staircase rising to the sunlit ground floor … the one and only doll world. Riccio has synthesized the spirit of our times: a narcissistic, self-obsession with youth, beauty, body perfection, constant self-improvement, unlimited success, material possessions and all the illusions of a perfect lifestyle. In Redecorating The Dream House, a pink front cues the dream’s inner life and we imagine Barbie or ourselves feasting on forever apple pie steaming in a whimsy kitchen as the dolls settle in a strawberry-cream couch.

In this book of poems, the poet has technically kidnapped Barbie from the playroom and put her in a book of poems to show citizens that they can stop dancing to Mattel’s musical colorings and question the truth behind her charming face and façade. In the Plastications section the poet describes all the various iterations of Barbies produced: first pitched on the Mickey Mouse Club/ the new doll on the block crowns a spiral staircase/ tiny, guiding foot steps into everyday… a long straight mane in your select color: sun-kissed blonde, red-head titian, chocolate bon-bon brunette… this Barbie brushes archetypes… Lady Godiva… untangles Milton’s wanton ringlets… a grain goddess… Queen Berenice… pre-Raphaelite femme. She is the quintessential icon of femininity and beauty marketed to us for over sixty years and along with her male counterpart, Ken, remain aspirational idols.

A plastic surgeon’s scalpel can give any woman Barbie’s perfect little nose, smooth chin and tummy tuck. Life-size, she can be any man’s fantasy. To shrink, to grow, to put on weight/to flat-foot the arch is not Barbie. In her own words she tells us I am on a first name basis with the world/like Cher, Madonna, Beyoncé or God. Any girl, any woman before any mirror/ begging the question (answer?)/ to which I am the answer.

This collection shines a light inside Plastic Republic’s cave, showing us the mirage of a corporate, projected, saleable image of a doll aimed to sell us a mindset. With these poems we can be free to discern reality; but even the poet herself realizes that this will not be enough to free us, because Barbie arrives at Juvenelia’s reception as debutante empress… a durable rite of passage… the Mattel tag totem owns the ideal female iconography mold. In the final poem in the book, “North Pacific Garbage Gyre,” The World Packaging Organization /takes the on-the-go lifestyle’s compulsive pulse/ graphs the time-poor consumer’s steadfast unconcern for environmental-cide… recycle, rebuy, regurgitate,/remembe/there’s opportunity in the breakdown of the sit-down family dinner/and while families break down/plastic is forever.
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“If one expects to read only one book of poems this year let it be Giovanna Riccio’s, “Plastic’s Republic.” So much more than a well-crafted collection of poetic musings on highfalutin, lofty subjects; this genre-bending collection, is a Barbie Bible for the Disenchanted. Her philosophical reflections, historical, sociological and personal verses on North America’s most loved and most hated 20th century cultural icon, create a playhouse fit for kings, queens, misfits and lost souls who can’t wait to revolt against the tyrannical, capitalist system that favors the strong over the weak, the young and pretty over the over-the-hillers. Despite Riccio’s serious meditation on the plastic Madonna of the West, this collection eschews the tirade against all that is no-damn-good about consumerism and its aftermath through the poet’s nuanced, bittersweet take on the subject. For one thing, she never fails to remember that Barbie is a doll, and like any plaything, one has to have serious fun with it. The underlying theme suggests that, in life, Barbie and Ken should have a limited shelf-life; there is no need for adults to bring in the guillotine and decapitate the decadent pair – girls everywhere can figure it out—it’s OK to toy with Barbie & Ken; what’s imperfect has soul, is much easier to love.
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“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. Constantly molded to fit the times and constantly molding gender expectations, for 60 years Barbie has taken over our imaginations as surely as the detritus of the “polymer empire” has taken over our planet’s oceans. From age-denying (if not -defying) humans to sex dolls, Barbie’s legacy is indeed plastic—in its original meaning: she continues to fit every need. 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.
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“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 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.

In responding to the human comedy of make-believe and desire, of lust for and worship of plastic, Giovanna Riccio has written a tour-de-force of undeniable genius. Quirky, philosophical, and adventurous in form, Plastic’s Republic is as avant-garde as an haute-couture runway and as cutting-edge as a surgeon’s scalpel. 

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