FACTORY DOLL is the poetry of availability and refusal. A late night google search for WHOLESALE SEXDOLLS returned the URL of a page on a Chinese wholesale marketplace. The page, structured like an eBay listing for a case of blowup dolls, was beautiful. The item description had been translated from Chinese into Machinglish thru google. The illustrative product images of hyperreal, hardbodied silicone sexdolls had been watermarked with the seller name, ’INFANT,’ and were so attractively baited that their hook was all but invisible. The single shard of truth in the listing was a thumbnail image of a generic, inflatable sexdoll sealed in a cellophane-windowed cardboard box.
Over 2.5 years, thousands of similar listings were reviewed. The best were cached, and an illustrated anthology of erotic sales literature for our sterile age of silent convenience emerged. The collection took its title from a sellers’ watermark: FACTORYDOLL. The anthology presented 30 excerpted item descriptions (edited with line breaks) as poetry, and set each poem beside a product photo appropriated from the same website. Four printers refused to print the book.
The text and images were too creepy for any of the American printers contacted to expose their production staff to. Based on printer complaints, the book was re-designed. None of the original material was censored.
Every poem was set in a different typeface found online. The most exhausting fonts were reserved for poems that included the phrases, “little girl,” or “young girl.” Every image was emended with, but not censored by, Christian clipart. Genitals were framed and accented wherever original uploaders hadn’t already self-censored. A subset of the edition had its VISITOR byline replaced with AI WEIWEI.
The absurdly de-designed FACTORY DOLL was resubmitted to the same printers. Two flatly rejected it. Two agreed to print it. The book stands as a highly concentrated distillation of borders, boundaries, communism, capitalism, censorship, workplace safety, sex, loneliness, misogyny and convenience at the dawn of the 21st Century.
