DECAPITATION CAPITAL: THE BLOODY EPISTLES OF KIM VODICKA’S ‘DEAR TED’
A REVIEW by Jack Skelley
On January 7, 1973, Edmund Kemper picked up 18-year-old hitchhiker Cindy Schall. He shot her dead, disposed of all her body parts except the head, and copulated with it for several days. Schall was just one of Kemper’s victims. They included his mother.
And Kemper is just one of the decapitators, necro-killers and mythic murderabilia researched by Kim Vodicka for her new collection Dear Ted (Really Serious Lit): an incantation on killers who signify romance most foul. Dear Ted addresses Ted Bundy, the famously “charming” serial killer. Ted joins many Vodicka metaphors. Transmuting the gruesome to verse, Vodicka elevates homicidal motives to pop-fable prominence. Conversely, she reduces them to the personal, conducting black-mass meditations on multi-psycho/sexual themes. And the whole way through, she tonally refracts via hyper-self-aware lingual gymnastics… reminding us that even homicidal word-play is play. And that Dear Ted is, at base, comic in tone.
Among the cleverest parts of Dear Ted’s Frankensteinian corpus – essentially one book-length poem – is “Plaster Caster.”
Total possession necessitates blowing loads into the dead, severed heads of the world’s most horrifying women. Maybe my upper esophageal sphincter will do better…
I choke-chortle on your cock and my own blood. The load you mean to blow in me is nigh. I feel it coming on. Rigor mortis, that is. You thought the head of the medusa would be immune to such things, but she’s human. She, too, can freeze.
The Medusa allusion is another deep-dive symbol.
As Vodicka told me, in addition to real and fictional accounts of corpse-fucking, “I also drew from anatomy texts/diagrams, classical poetry and mythology, and The Laugh of the Medusa by Cixous.” This is the 1975 essay by feminist writer Hélène Cixous urging women to become feminist writers. (Jacques Derrida proclaimed her "the greatest writer in what I will call my language, the French language if you like.")
Cixous famously begins: “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.”
If Cixous empowers sexuality via corporeal-texts – reminding us that Kathy Acker was once said to have urged her students to write while masturbating – Vodicka inscribes hate mail to male crimes upon women’s bodies and emotions.
Dear Ted metaphors veer from necrophilia to emotional S&M to open-heart surgery. In “Beautiful as a Chance Meeting” a woman has relations with her partner’s cardiopulmonary system:
I’ll mount your chest on the operating table, beautiful as a chance meeting. I’ll wrap my cunt around your heart, labial skin graft becoming a new aorta, secured to your heart with pubic hairline sutures, the origin of your pulse pulsing the pulse of my clit…
My heart-to-cunt orgasms will occur slowly, after several hundred steady beats.
It would appear as though the surest way to your heart is to bypass it…
Vodicka relentlessly inverts clichés and subverts popular idioms. Looping and re-looping riffs of betrayal and abuse. They snarl. They spit. But it would be a wrong to reduce this invective to the merely livid. The language is too mannered and amusing for that, as if baroque expression itself redeems and frees. (Cixous agrees.) Art before anger.
And there is yet another level of play at work: Memphis-based Vodicka is both writer and performer. Her deathly texts reanimate when she sing/recites them in public, often in live collaborations, as in this event taped at legendary Sun studios with musician Ben Ricketts. (Ricketts and Vodicka also partner on the Dear Ted EP, available with pre-order of the book from Really Serious Lit.)
The whole shebang of a book sutures together with inspired jolts. Including the haiku-y intros and outros.
Results of the autopsy are in: Kim Vodicka is the real killer, slaying with necromantic language illegal in most states. Including the states of denial, arousal & psychosis.
SCOTUS should be forced to read her.
Dear Ted by Kim Vodicka
Available now for preorder from Really Serious Lit
Reviewed by Jack Skelley
Los Angeles writer Jack Skelley’s books include Monsters (Little Caesar Press) and Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press). Semiotext(e) will publish Jack’s novel Fear of Kathy Acker in spring 2023. His psychedelic surf band Lawndale (SST Records) will release a new album in 2022.