Doe: (Akron Poetry)

Winner of the 2018 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize Doe began as author Aimée Baker's attempt to understand and process the news coverage of a single unidentified woman whose body was thrown from a car leaving Phoenix, Arizona. It soon grew into a seven-year-long project with the goal to document, mourn, and witness the stories of missing and unidentified women in the United States.

About the Author :
Aimée Baker is a multi-genre writer with work appearing in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, The Massachusetts Review, and others. In 2014, she was awarded the Zoland Poetry Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Baker received her MFA from Arizona State University. She lives in upstate New York and teaches as a lecturer at SUNY Plattsburgh, where she also serves as fiction editor for Saranac Review.

Review :
"Doe, winner of the 2016 Akron Poetry Prize, is a book of poems about women who have gone missing or whose bodies remain unidentified in the United States, each poem grappling with questions about who these individual women are and what happened to them. [...] In clumsier hands, a book like Doe might come off as gimmicky or voyeuristic or melodramatic -- or worse, exploitative of what has befallen these women. In truth, these poems sometimes play with imagery not unlike that of a horror flick. But then the horrific world of Doe is one in which women are in constantly peril of losing their lives, their bodies, their whole selves. Baker's poems are not cautionary tales or grisly reenactments, but they do remind us that the awful world these women lived in is the same one we live in. They introduce us to those who are gone from the world and ask us to observe their absence, to ask where they are now."--W. Todd Kaneko, www.waxwingmag.org ...so good, so well executed with such difficult subject matter. I admire its active courage, its commitment to witnessing what so many reject. [...]Doe is a game changer, a silence eliminator. --Allison Joseph, 2016 Akron Poetry Prize judge A terrible beauty is born in this book-length elegy for female victims of kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder; the presumed dead, the disappeared, and the unidentified. These last, for whom the book is named, remind us of women's universal vulnerability as the hunted gender. In language both violent and tender, the book exhumes the cases of women from across the continent and the century, bearing witness to their spirits, prayers, and passions. Doe is a suite of gorgeously orchestrated poems that remind us not to turn away from the news. Instead, it commands us to resist injustice with the compassion that only art can bring to life. I wholly admire this haunting, stunning, and necessary book, and I endorse it with no reservations.--Naomi Guttman, 2018 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize Judge