Published by M. Scott Douglass at MSR Publishing Co
40 pages, $13 (+ shipping)
Projected Print Date: October 2025
An Advance Sale Discount price of $7.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $12/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Reviews
-
![]()
Meg Day
Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize
Recipient of The Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award
Selected for Best New Poets of 2013
—
Massey lends nuanced exploration of form and bold embrace of visceral image to a new, queer divinity: American Nesting Doll investigates the violence of gender and the interiority of embodiment with a narrative temporality all its own. These poems make a home for memory and futurity—neither of which are steadfast—and accumulate in revelation under Massey’s curation. I am excited that this collection is merely an introduction of what’s to come for this poet.
-
![]()
Pedro Lopes de almeida
Previous Brown University Deans' Faculty Fellow
Distinguished with the Faculty and Postdoctoral LGBTQIA+ Advocacy Award
—
American Nesting Doll unfolds as an intricate filigree of language shaped by poetic invention. Like Bernini’s marble, it reads as an exploding bouquet or murmuring monument—radiant, baroque, always reaching for the epiphany of intimacy through precise words. This epiphany bleeds through the pages, transforming meaning into texture, tension, and sound: “a house so blood-thick / I mistake it for my mother so loud / her body becomes dense / and hieroglyphic as braille.” (“Nesting Doll”)
