Black cardigan sweater, blue jeans, white sneakers, chipped nail polish, ovarian cyst, and so on and so on.
When DOE arrived in my mail, I didn’t know what to make of it. A little disclosure: I’m a Patreon supporter of the publisher, so I receive each of the books they publish before they go up for sale. I know nothing about them beforehand and I don’t know what I’m going to get.
Out of the mailer came this big black tome with just the word DOE on the cover, no author listed. There’s the hint of a face in the letter O. That’s it. The back cover lists the phrase “black shirt” over and over again with slight alterations. The table of contents is the the 50 states. A bit foreboding. So, I read the first poem. A description of a dead body. Compelling. I read the second poem. Another description of a dead body. Then I got it. And a smile, perhaps alarmingly, spread across my face. What a piece of conceptual art.
DOE is 624 pages of poetry using the descriptions of John and Jane Does from the national database as the source material. Each title is the county, town, city, etc. the body was discovered in.
Why does a concept that is so unusual work? It’s novel, of course. I can’t think of any other book like this that I’ve read. But, if that were all there is to DOE, you could set the book aside as a clever gimmick and that’s that. If I had read one or two these poems out of context online, for example, I’m not sure I would have reacted so strongly. The key here is the book as object. The ominous black book of death. The thorough, ghoulish, ultimately numbing onslaught of bodies. So many bodies all across America.
The descriptions, and therefore the poems, change in structure based on how much detail was left on that particular person in the database. Poems range from short, four word lines just listing attire to the known circumstances around the victim’s fate, such as an association with a serial killer. Taken together, a grim portrait emerges of the sheer amount of anonymous death that surrounds us everyday. DOE brings to mind our cultural obsession with true crime stories. Background noise podcasts about a woman getting her throat slit. Something to listen to while cooking dinner. The difference is there’s no drama here. No formatting for entertainment purposes. No whodunits and humanizing anecdotes. No detective that sleuths his way to justice.
No, these are the clinical descriptions of the people that we pass by and, god help us, ignore on the way to work in the morning. People down on their luck. Poor circumstances and bad decisions. Undesirables. Not like you and I, of course. It couldn’t possibly happen to us. Right?
That’s the horror of DOE. It is not some shock jock parlor trick. It’s an indictment of our society. The atomization wrought by the capitalist machine that feeds on fear and selfishness. Did these hundreds of people not deserve dignity? Closure for their families? They couldn’t even be given a name.
So, by the time you get 500 pages in and you’ve read about another black t-shirt, a pair of underwear, the hope is you would consider yourself lucky that someone would look for you if you were missing. That someone would come down to the morgue and say “Yes, I knew this person and I loved them.”