Anti-Capitalist Love Poems for the Future: Marie Buck’s Unsolved Mysteries

What makes a life worth documenting? And whose lives are most often documented in capitalist societies? Unsolved Mysteries, Marie Buck’s most
recent book of poetry, raises these questions and more as the author explores the television show of the same title. Completed before the Netflix 2020 reboot of the series, Buck’s book focuses on the show’s original run in the 1980s and 90s. However, this book isn’t about rehashing or dwelling in the past, nor is it simply about a TV show and the terrible deaths the show documented. Ultimately, it is a book about life and the reasons to keep going. It’s about imagining a future where things aren’t so shitty.  

The poems throughout Unsolved Mysteries feature a speaker who is likely the author themself: a leftist organizer whose day job is with a publication (Buck is the managing and web literary editor at Social Text). Many of the long, discursive poems tend toward prose and could just as easily be described as lyric essays. They explore media the speaker has consumed, from books to documentaries; detail explicit sexual encounters; discuss protest and activism; and document working class people’s lives. 

A number of poems take for their titles the names of people featured in Unsolved Mysteries episodes, such as “Dottie Caylor,” a poem in which the author details a missing woman who was most likely killed by her husband, and “Kari Lynn Nixon,” an incredible poem about possible liberation from small town norms:

I imagine some scenarios 

in which

she leaves because she’s being abused

or to go be queer in New York City

 

or to go do drugs in New York City

or to go be with a lover in New York City

 

Buck imagines Kari Lynn Nixon and a friend living in a squat, finding loving chosen families, falling in love with people, and making weird art (perhaps an escape dream of Buck’s own, who elsewhere in the book details growing up in rural South Carolina). Devastatingly, after dreaming of the possibilities of a different life, Buck reveals the episode has an update that Kari was raped and murdered by a neighbor. This gets right to one of the major themes of the book, as Buck writes in “Documentation”: “Most of the people in Unsolved Mysteries would not have very well-documented lives, were it not for their horrible deaths.” The author connects this to a book by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966), which describes how to use visuals for extreme memorization, a common practice “for record-keeping before people had easy access to paper and print” that can be used to create a memory system for ideas. Yates warns against using the “anonymous lower classes” in these visual exercises, unless the image is made exceptional by disfiguring them, “as by introducing one stained with blood.” Buck interprets this concept for us: “we can bloodstain people when we think of them, and then they are memorable.” Buck inverts the memorization trick by imagining wealthy people, like Jeff Bezos, stained with blood in order to remember the lives of people like those featured in Unsolved Mysteries. 

This desire to see better outcomes for the people on Unsolved Mysteries, friends of the author, and the working class in general occurs throughout the collection and connects to the speaker’s desire for socialism. In “The Dead,” Buck writes, “Maybe socialism will undo our deadness,” and in “That Optical Illusion Where You Think Someone Else’s Arm Is Your Own, Except Instead the Topic Is the Future,” they write, “I’m picturing the world not being garbage, me and my lover in the non-garbage world feeling not like garbage.” Buck turns to numerous documentaries to study protest and labor movements, from striking coal miners to the civil rights movement and ACT UP. In “Haunted by a Strange Double,” Buck writes about Eyes on the Prize, a documentary about the civil rights movement, and quotes Ed Nixon, a Montgomery community leader who acknowledges he got involved with the civil rights movement so that his kids and grandkids could have a better life, but then he changed his mind: “Hell, I want to enjoy some of this stuff myself.” Here and in other poems,  Buck acknowledges the possibility that one will not get to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.  

However, one thing we can enjoy in the here and now is sex. And throughout the collection, sex is presented as a form of resistance, “mid-day fucking” described as “the opposite of work.” Under capitalism, anxiousness seems to permeate everything except for sex, according to the speaker of “Let’s Pretend Today Is Not a Sunday, But a Weekday.” Sex is also a place for radical imagination and provides fuel for the hard work of organizing your neighbors and showing up for meetings and protests. In the poem “Dream in Which You Are Ineffectually Surveilled,” Buck describes a world in which “our genitals would oscillate from the form for sexual desire to the form for political desire and back again.” Political action frequently means putting your body on the line, and in “Let’s Say It’s Possible After All,” it’s the bodies of anarchists that show up to protect a hexing of Brett Kavanaugh that keep the Proud Boys away. Threat of violence averted, the speaker raises their bandana to engage in an awkward three person makeout session.

In “My Death,” Buck imagines what their own teenage death would have been like in the small town of their childhood. The poem mentions a podcast called Small Town Murder, which bills itself as putting a “comedic spin” on researching murders that took place in small towns. While Unsolved Mysteries is certainly exploitative, Buck comments, “At least [it] didn’t try to be funny.” Putting a comedic spin on horrible tragedy is clearly in bad taste and doesn’t show care for the real people’s lives being discussed. This stands in juxtaposition to Buck’s own project, where great care is shown to the people Buck writes about, whether they’re people from the TV show or from Buck’s own life. Earlier in “My Death,” Buck writes about hanging out with childhood friends: “I almost wrote that we would talk about our lives, but I do not think we would: we talked about rituals and books that we read; all of it aspirational to being somewhere else.” This ambition to be somewhere better is extended to those who have died and to all of us alive today living under an exploitative system.

Ultimately the book Unsolved Mysteries is a hopeful project. In the poem “Ars Poetica,” written the week that David Berman, one of the first poets Buck loved, died by suicide, they recall first learning about ars poeticas and greatly disliking them “because they suggested there was nothing to write about: if we’re making poems about poems instead of about the world, and the world isn’t worthy of note, and there’s no experience of a thing to point to, then why stay alive?” In another poem that discusses suicide, “There Are Not a Lot of Universes in Which Time Travel Is Possible,” Buck asks:

–Why are we still doing this? (“This” being getting up, going to work, everything we associate with “life,” tbh.)

 

And then the response:

 

–If you stopped doing this, you’d literally never find out what happens next.

 

It’s hard to answer why we’re still doing this, but also very easy to answer why you personally are still doing it: to see what everyone else does. The gap between yourself and others–which we might think is a source of isolation–is actually what keeps you wanting to animate your body.

In the final poem of the book “Oh,” Buck writes, “It is probably impossible to sleep with anyone right now who has a hopeful view of the future […].” They conclude, “I’ll fuck only people aware of impending doom.” They later express a wish to have their outlook about hope changed. However, the poem, and therefore the book, ends with the phrase, “dreaming of what comes next,” which is why I’d argue this is a hopeful project. There is a reason to stay alive, and for Buck’s speaker it has something to do with dreaming. Throughout the collection, the speaker dreams alternatives to the reality we live in. They rewrite endings or avoid them altogether through an insistence that the missing person in an Unsolved Mysteries episode is still alive; that, in fact, we all will go on living forever, either in the archive or on Jeff Bezos’s money. Buck acknowledges that they will live on in this book, “to haunt you […] Roaming the earth and getting pulped and roaming some more.” The book works as an anti-capitalist love poem to a future that may never arrive,  a vision of a better world that we can work toward, even if we never get to see it.

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Gina Myers is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Some of the Times (Barrelhouse, 2020). She lives in Philadelphia.