The Murderino in Me: Reading Aimée Baker’s Doe
by Ruth Williams
The woman at the heart of Aimée Baker’s debut full-length poetry collection Doe is familiar. She is dead or she’s missing, likely as a result of foul play, likely as a result of—we suspect—a man.
While each of the poems in Doe, winner of the 2016 Akron Poetry Prize, are accompanied by epigraphs that attach dates, places, and (when known) names to these missing women, by invoking “Jane Doe,” Baker suggests one of Doe’s reasons for being. Too often, in true crime entertainment we use Jane Doe as a conduit through which we consume stories of men behaving badly. As Alice Bolin writes in “Toward a Theory of a Dead Girl Show,” in her essay collection Dead Girls, the Dead Girl is never a main character of stories that arise from her death; rather, her body becomes, for detectives and murders alike, “a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.” Bolin observes, “It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again, but not enough to see a pattern.”
In Doe, Baker attempts to reverse this Dead Girlification of missing and murdered women by reanimating their last moments in order to reorient the camera angle, focusing less on acts of violence and the men who enact them, and more on the women themselves. And yet, even as the poems individuate these women, ceding back to them something other than mere victimhood, the accrual of their bodies across the collection destabilizes their singularity, suggesting the terrible “pattern,” as Bolin calls it, of violence against women.
Doe is divided into two simply titled sections, “Missing” and “Unidentified;” yet, the poems within represent a restless diversity of forms that resist familiar Dead Girl tropes. Despite the fact that each of these cases involves violence and death, each missing or unidentified woman is an individual, her story her own, and thus requires a different form to tell—lyric poems, prose poems, poems that adopt or reference other forms, among them prayers to saints, UFO abduction narratives, fairy tales.
One of the poems that highlights Baker’s effective use of form is “Scorpiris.” “Scorpiris” details the disappearance of Iris Brown, missing from Burlington, Vermont since March 15, 1976. Unlike many of the poems in Doe, where perpetrators remain unknown or unnamed, Baker identifies the murderer of Brown by name: William Posey, a prison associate of Brown’s boyfriend, who confessed to Brown’s murder in 2008. “Scorpiris” proceeds down the page in two columns, one belonging to “Iris,” “this small flower, / designed for survival, [that] knows the trickery / of attraction,” and the other to “Posey.” As the poem unfolds, Baker feeds lines on the right side of the page into the left, forcing Iris’ column to become part of Posey’s story:
Not flower. Not efflorescence. Not daughter
of sea and wind. That morning, with her lips pressed hot against
cheeks cold-flushed red, she opened the car
door, trusting.
Not mythical creature. Not sweet sedative.
Not rooted blades. That morning, in the dark he waited for her until
frosted daybreak when she held golden light
in her palm, hoping for a reunion with her
lover.
What is compelling about this structure is the way it suggests the arresting Posey does to Iris’ narrative. Posey’s lines distort the beauty of Iris’ moment, the “golden light” sullied by the “dark” of Posey. While this poem is clearly rooted in details from the case, Baker uses the form and meditation on the symbolism of flowers to move the poem beyond a mere account of Brown’s murder. It isn’t until the end that the overt violence of the crime is depicted: “That morning, on a deserted stretch of / highway, there was no movement after he / wrapped his fingers around her throat.”
Just as Posey’s text inserts itself into and interrupts the lines of Iris in “Scorpiris,” so many of the poems in Doe highlight the way a woman’s free movement, her bodily agency, is taken from her in these acts of violence. Women in these poems are “driving home, keeping the wheels tight to the yellow line,” they are girls, riding bikes with “legs pumping and pumping,” they are a woman on a train, “suitcase tucked at her knees and cash rolled tight in her pocket,” they are young women who “left Eagle Butte a lifetime ago / and became small nymphs, hips cocked / to the side, thumbs flung out with abandon.”
Boxed lines come from Baker’s collection.
The violence these women encounter stops them from this freedom; as Baker describes in “How the Ocean and the Desert Meet,” the men “pluck her up, net her out of existence.” While the motivations of those who harmed these women are various, there’s a sense one gets from carefully reading Baker’s recounting that men who seek power and control over women are threatened by their freedom of movement, their pleasure, their joy, their disregard. For a reader versed in patriarchal ideology, it is easy to see how men who derive value from their sense of perceived power over others are deeply threatened, sometimes to the point of violence, by women like these.
Take, for example, “The Origin of Language,” about Sequoya Vargas, missing since August 22, 1993, from Hilo Hawaii. In this poem, the likely violence done to Vargas’s body, who was raped multiple times, is not something Baker imagines, nor do we hear much about the perpetrators, a group of young men Vargas knew; instead, describing the murder, Baker shifts the narrative, explaining:
But like all things,
it can be reduced
to a beginning.
Not the moment
she opened
the door or slid
a chess piece across
a board. It begins
in the place they do,
in the murk
where three boys
began to take breath.
It doesn’t matter what Vargas was wearing or doing or how she went willingly or was drugged. It is the boys who cause this girl’s death and so the lens falls on them, but obliquely, their “murk” suggestive of the culture of toxic masculinity in which these boys were born. And yet, like all of the work in Doe, this poem doesn’t dwell on the men who commit the act; instead, it returns its focus to Vargas, who is suspected to have been thrown in the ocean, rendered now with an agency that goes beyond the acts of men:
But here is
where she learns
this beat of light
and salt sounds nothing
like the inside
of a shell.
How do you pay witness to a woman’s life and the way it ended without treating her like a Dead Girl, especially when the information available to you is solely related to her disappearance or death? This is a difficult challenge, indeed; especially, in the second half of the book where the poems arise from the cases of unidentified women. The unidentified are literally without identity and thus, Baker has to find a way to write into their stories and their deaths without allowing the poem to be only about a violent end.
As she does in “The Origin of Language,” Baker often turns to nature as a way of returning agency to the destroyed, violated, decaying body. The dead observe and learn, even teach, in Baker’s treatment. Take, for example, “Contact Prints,” about the case of two unidentified women found in 1968 and 1969 in Berks Country, Pennsylvania (As the image below suggests, the women have since been identified). The poem uses a first-person address, imagining the girls running from men with “mollusked hands” who cruelly let the girls “think we’re free” but who ultimately “keep pace,” catching up and killing them. Baker muffles the murder in the poem, having the speaker simply say, “I run until I stop.” Then, the body’s decay does its work:
Alone through the spring I learn to emulsify. I teach
the stone the contours
of my shoulder,
the line
of my hip.
Here, despite her death, it is the speaker whose body teaches the land, even in its destruction. In this regard, Baker’s project seeks to be restorative, as much as one can restore something to women whose lives end in violent ways. Showing the body’s communion with nature, literally or figuratively, in one way of pushing beyond the violent end of the Dead Girl story.
Many pundits have noted the contemporary explosion in true crime media and the overwhelming audience of women who, like me, consume Dead Girl narratives with fervor. In her study of women and true crime, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, Rachel Monroe describes her experience at CrimeCon, a convention that allows participants to indulge their interest in all things crime. Despite explanations that root women’s interest in true crime as a kind of self-protective measure, Monroe describes herself and the mostly female attendees, thusly: “We found pleasure in these bleak accounts of kidnappings and assaults and torture chambers.” In one scene, Monroe recounts conference attendees being led through a closed-eye exercise in which they imagine themselves as victims of a serial killer who bound and tortured his victims. It’s a repulsive moment. It feels like these women are piggy-backing on a woman’s death in a way that feels very Dead Girl—the women who actually died are abstract, the focus is on the manner of their death and the man behind it.
Being interested in violence or the macabre isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but as someone with such interests, I found myself reading Doe attentive to and wary of the nature of my own response. I wanted to consume the stories of these women, often Googling to find out the “true story” behind the poems, something I’ve attempted to evoke here with the inclusion of screenshots—passive looking, consuming details. And yet, Baker’s work calls me to attend to different lessons from these cases. As Monroe observes in Savage Appetites, while consuming true crime can be problematic, we have the option of consuming consciously; she asserts, the “murder stories we tell, and the ways we tell them, have a political and social impact that are worth taking seriously. Lessons are embedded in the gory details.” To glean these lessons, though, takes a different kind of reading and, by extension, of storytelling too. The poems in Doe offer a lesson in the foundational misogyny that compels violence against women as well as the role poetry, and art more broadly, might play in telling stories of missing and murdered women as something more than Dead Girls.
Ruth Williams is the author of Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Nursewfiery (Jacar Press, 2019), and Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, jubilat, Pleiades, and Third Coast among others. Her scholarly work on women's writing and feminism appears in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, The Journal of Popular Culture, Michigan Feminist Studies, College Literature, and The Writer's Chronicle.