UNSOLVED MYSTERIES
by Marie Buck
Marie Buck’s new Roof Book Unsolved Mysteries collects a group of short prose pieces that mashup stories from the television show Unsolved Mysteries and her reminiscences growing up in rural South Carolina. Buck’s work unravels not only the mysteries of the TV series, but also how American popular culture portrays the working class.
The violence of the lives and deaths of people named Dexter and Kari Lynn in the TV show inspire in Buck ambitions for social justice, revelatory sexual engagements and hope for clarity in documenting what really happens to people in contrast to the cleaned-up versions of more commercial narratives.
Buck keeps hoping people will be alright, but she knows they died in pain and their deaths cause unending sorrow to their families. Such clear and poignant social texts are rare among today’s poets, especially when they converge honesty and sympathy. Readers will find no sentimentality in Unsolved Mysteries, but they may find themselves.
People are saying:
Unsolved Mysteries, the soft procedural televised melodrama born in the 1980s, is playing in the background of Marie Buck’s magnificent Unsolved Mysteries, offering its pop version of ordinary USAmerican violence as ambient information. Meanwhile, Buck’s book is concerned with a larger, historical, more fundamentally unsolved mystery: how can we reconcile our lust with our immiseration, the glimpsed utopia of “quivering and cumming” with the horrific conditions which maintain our ability to quiver and cum. There’s no solution to that mystery, obviously, even if we know who the culprits are. This book is for all of us who keep the case open, documenting a way to love, write, fuck, and fight our way into a bad history unmeant for us. I love this book. - Brandon Brown
Does Marie Buck believe in fate? She certainly believes in sin, not the way you think: “Jeff Bezos, say, and his peers will have their blood spilt eternally,” and when they do it’ll look like Kool-Aid. Unsolved Mysteries talks with blistering clarity about mass death in order to refuse fate, or to package it up and ship it to the expropriators, super-express. It’s magnificently about transubstantiation: whose brains are going to nourish the fields? Whose overdue deaths will bring the dead more fully back to life—those of us preemptively “sleeping in a pile with the non-rich?” Unsolved Mysteries insists on the inadequacy of simply wanting what we want, how indispensable to want it insatiably anyways. - Kay Gabriel
About the author:
Marie Buck’s previous books include Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul (Roof Books) and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya). She is the managing and web literary editor at Social Text and lives in Brooklyn.