Dear Ted

Review by Alex Carrigan

The fascination Americans have with serial killers is at multiple times fascinating, haunting, and strangely comical. The idea that people would idolize or revere people who commit awful crimes is one that could be blamed on the media, the effects of 19th century romance literature, or whatever source du jour is chosen for the latest look at the inner workings of these “troubled” and “misunderstood” murderers.

With works like the two Netflix releases about Ted Bundy, one of which was the documentary series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and the other the Zac Efron film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, it calls into question how much of an obsession with serial killers is too much.

This question is further explored in Kim Vodicka’s forthcoming poetry collection Dear Ted. Coming from Really Serious Literature, the collection is described as “about Ted Bundy, but not about Ted Bundy.” Through her hybrid work, Vodicka assembles poems that aim to depower the Bundy legend, slowly peeling away the layers with a blunt knife until the brutalized remains are all that’s left. The poems in the collection also seek to reveal the applicability in how dismantling a figure like Bundy can dismantle men like him who, while they may not be serial killers, have a way of destroying women in a variety of physical, mental, and emotional ways.

Having reviewed Vodicka’s previous collection The Elvis Machine for Empty Mirror, one of the elements that remains at its strongest is Vodicka’s use of structure and form to enhance creative wordplay and criticism. Dear Ted is divided into three sections, entitled “Circles”, with two versions of a poem entitled “How Do You Feel About Love?” framing the collection. The “love” poems make a variety of statements to introduce the reader into the mind space of the narrators of the poems, with the opening poem making statements like “Rose-tinted spectaculars, / but at what opportunity cost? / Boxes of chocolate / always know / what they’re gonna get.”

After that, the collection moves into the first Circle, “Circle of Mania.” The poems in this section are the ones that speak the most to Bundy, coming off like post-mortem monologues from his victims or diary entries of his modern fangirls. The second, “Circle of Shit,” is a lot more graphic in its depictions of scat fetishes, but one where the fantasy of destroying the body is broken down into its most gruesome and disgusting realities. The final section, “Circle of Blood,” is where the power is reclaimed, and the pieces speak more towards the narrator’s epiphany towards these types of men and how she can utilize their skills for her own form of dominance.

Throughout the collection, Vodicka’s poetry uses multiple stanza breaks to highlight specific statements like, with some pages taking these stanzas and blowing them up into large, ransom-letter-esque scrawlings. This forces the reader to absorb everything stated in the pieces, but also feel the bluntness of the main themes of the book. In “Emotional BDSM,” Vodicka writes:

Imagine dating Ted Bundy

and feeling jealous

of the girls he murdered.

 

Imagine being so insecure

that you’re literally jealous

of a parade of dead girls.

 

Imagine being afraid

of the one you love.

 

It’s easy.

 

You probably don’t even need

to try.

She also addresses the survivor/victim aspect of these kinds of stories. In “TC/CW,” she writes,

I resent the term survivor.

 

It seems to negate those

who did not, in fact, survive.

 

Dead girls are people, too.

Later in the collection, she also uses the Medusa myth as a metaphor for the kind of woman who was abused and destroyed, but still had great power. This can be seen in the prose poem “Plaster Caster,” where the gorgon is able to slay the killer even after death, writing, “The laugh of the medusa is the laugh of the abyss. When you fuck it, it fucks you back.”

Dear Ted is probably one of the most unsettling and challenging poetry collections to come out in recent years, as Vodicka’s writing can push one’s tolerance levels to newly discovered limits or thresholds. However, the main goal of the collection is to deglamorize the culture around destructive, violent men that foolishly seeks to find depth and nuance to their terrible actions. The collection’s use of these unpleasant qualities and recentering on the female perspective in these cases breaks down how human and how fallible these men are and how trying to assign depth to these monstrous figures is not only ridiculous, but also a disservice to their victims, whose depth and complexity was ignored in order to sate whatever fetish or impulse their killers and abusers had. Dear Ted reminds the reader that these men are all just blood, shit, and mania when you truly examine them on the autopsy table. Vodicka isn’t afraid to display these aspects in their raw glory if it means providing a catharsis to those affected and a means to push the cadaver into the furnace.