The once and future Spokesbitch of a Generation is back, following up one of the most compelling, honest and cockpunching collections of 2020. This time, she is focusing on Ted Bundy, his ilk, and our cultural obsession with them, as well as what it says about us as people. She once promised that, if you thought she was something, then just wait till you saw her dick. Dear Ted whips that dick out, smacks you in the face with it, and makes you choke on a good gallon or so of rancid cum before it leaves you battered on the side of the road.
It would be easy to go with straight depictions of the murders, a la The Devil’s Dreamland, but that shit’s been done. And in a damn fine book. Instead, Kim pictures herself simultaneously as the fangirl obsessed with Bundy and as his victim. She delves deep into the squishy desire to be both a dehumanized thing of flesh to be used and an object of adoration, as well as how the need to be the latter often results in women accepting being the former.
It all starts with love. Specifically, it starts with the sad truth of what too many of us think of when we think of love. There is no mutuality. There is just predation and the prey begging to be needed, even as they are devoured. These poems are witty and punchy, but they cut deep. In scant few lines, you will be scarred.
And that is just the beginning.
She then dives into the mania of worship and supplication. There is a suicide will to these poems that professes a connection between the love for another and the sacrifice for the self. A sardonic glare at the idiot idea that the one can only exist hand in hand with the other. As the reader, I could feel myself gagging on the bile she leaves festering in the sun for a culture that teaches such things as a matter of course.
Because that is what Kim does with her work. Yes, it is shocking. Both in its blatant sexuality and in how it revels in our ruin. Yes, it is brash and aggressive. Yup, she gets more than a bit salty with her language. But she is digging into wounds we try way to hard to pretend don’t exist. Her work might, at times, be a lanced boil, yet the infection can’t be excised if we don’t acknowledge the bubbling putrescence beneath the skin.
Dear Ted may not be a gorefest of the highest degree, but it is as hardcore as any horror you may think you are throwing down and is a collection that stands toe to fucking toe with Wrath James White’s If You Died Tomorrow I would Eat Your Corpse. If this is what being choked by your dick feels like, Kim, then I am grateful for the opportunity.
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