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. Continue reading
