Isdal

by Susannah Dickey

A Guardian and Irish Times Book of 2023

The much-anticipated debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey, on the subject of our cultural obsession with true crime.

ISDAL is a timely interrogation of the true crime genre. In the first of its three parts, we follow the flirty co-presenters of a podcast about the mystery of 'Isdal Woman', whose burnt remains were discovered in Norway in 1970 and who has never been identified.

At the centre of the book is an inquiry into our perennial obsession with female victims, sexiness, and ‘The death in question has already occurred’, the poet observes, ‘has occurred to someone sufficiently abstract as to allow us to romp gainfully, guilelessly, guiltlessly through a simulacrum of death’s corridors’.

The free verse poems in the final section both explore and – perhaps inevitably – enact the ethical ambiguities of the genre. Witty, excoriating, formally ingenious, ISDAL marks the arrival of a thrilling talent in contemporary poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Irish Literature

116 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 14, 2023

Reviews

[Till Raether · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of poetry about true crime, trauma, and the utter helplessness of being alive and trying to communicate. The poems about the podcast hosts find a language for cringe that has pathos and humor at the same time. The passages about the children who discovered the body of the Isdal woman are tender and respectful. This book covers a lot of ground, it tries to do a lot of things, and it does not mind failing at some of them. I really like that.

[Krianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For a person to garner sympathy from us, they must be made to be like us. To garner fascination, they must be made to be unlike us. For pathos the first is needed, for perversion the second. Regardless of whether the desired elicitation is one, or both, it’s an act of making. Formulating theories about their death is equally an act of making.”

[Mim · Rating 1 out of 5]

for me, this did not work

[Emma]

I really enjoyed the second half of this. There’s a bit where she’s talking about a riddle — how a farmer is to cross a river in a boat with two seats with a pig and a wolf and grain, or a fox and a chicken and chicken food. She extends this: how is a father to cross a river with a disturbing image and two daughters. How to cross a mountain. How is a sister meant to manage seeing and protecting, sharing the seen and the new chasm.

[Christopher M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing collection in 3 sections, starting with a parody of a true crime podcast objectifying and commodifying a real murder victim, ending with an exploration of how the person who found the body might feel, with a prose discussion of psychology in the middle. The changing structures and styles for different voices are used cleverly, but some of the language seems to have been chosen to be obscure rather than poetic and beautiful - who says "paronomasia" when they mean "pun?" - to the extent that some of the later entries read like word salad.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/VNlGuyztpfI

[Joy McClean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obsessed. Got a bit lost in the sauce in the last section but by that point I loved it so much I didn’t even care.
—
“How to understand a woman’s thoughts? Their penumbra / complexities. You can’t. Onwards they go, into the tundra.”

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

i didn’t really get this as a whole tbh but some of the lines were beautiful and dickey has such an impressive vocabulary

[Mars · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you think the women who produce those true crime podcasts are object or subject? Are we pointing, praying or purging here?

[Oliver Shrouder · Rating 4 out of 5]

True Crime and Poetry go together here so seamlessly it makes me wonder how this hasn't been explored more before - a fantastic debut collection

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely dashing and mesmerising. I loved the writing style just as much as the societal criticism, the philosophical questioning of our morbid curiosity and its potential origins.

Bonus points: Susannah Dickey didn’t butcher the many French words she uses.

[Sian Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting premise. I don't normally read poetry so I found it a little tricky finding the rhythm of it and a lot of the last section was completely lost on me. But there was great writing and lots of interesting critique given on true crime that I found particularly provoking as a reformed true crime consumer.

[Carrie Etter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent debut exploring the Isdal woman's case and our cultural attraction to True Crime, especially to murdered women. The use of rhyme is masterly, the wit and intelligence abundant. A book I'll surely return to and have already been recommending to others.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the final book in the Felix Dennis First Collection Prize, which is one of the two prizes that fall under the remit of the Forward Poetry Prize. This, or Bad Diaspora Poems, would probably be my choice.

In 'On Murder Considered One of the Fine Arts' Thomas de Quincey says, …the mob of newspaper readers are pleased with anything, providing it is bloody enough. Now de Quincey's essay is a sharp and satirical one, but ISDAL is sharp too. It challenges the recent trend for 'True Crime' to become the subject of podcasts.

This long poem reminded me in structure of 'In Parentheses' by David Jones in that it is both poem and prose. The collection is divided into three sections:

I - Podcast
II - Narrative
III - Composite

The first section introduces us to the Woman of Isdal, who is a real woman. She was found dead in Norway in 1970. She has never been identified. Her death and life have created a lot of questions which has allowed a lot of people to pontificate on who she was and why she might have died. The first section presents us with the story from the point of view of two podcasters who have started investigating the crime.

This section is mainly made up of individual poems, which ask questions of what the purpose of the podcast is and who it serves:

…They need listeners to bestow their trust
and invest in this ten-part description of cruelty."

Dickey really focuses on the way we dehumanise the victims of crime, especially women, in these types of podcast. She questions the role that the podcasters play and what they are trying to gain and the complicity of us - the audience - as voyeurs. She talks about the kind of information that they want and that keeps an audience interested.

It's better that she's not a prostitute. (More sympathy to aggregate.)

…In lieu of young, they'd give
anything for her to be Jewish. There'd be sympathy
and intrigue, if only she were Jewish!

It's a subtle but scathing questioning of the whole true crime genre.

The second section, Narrative, is more prose seeming and more philosophical. Asking questions about what we get from our interaction with true crime. She talks about George Bataille's idea of continuity and discontinuity, about how we choose who is worth of grief and who isn't.
The American public was not permitted to criticise or question the retaliatory tactics of the US government; the American public was not permitted to grieve the lives lost as a result of these tactics. This is because the narrative around the invasion depended on a clear delineation between 'us' and 'them'. To grieve the 'other' would be to challenge the membrane between the 'I' and the 'you', to question what lives are presented as real, and what lives are presented as unreal."

There is more detailed talk - quoting from Elisabeth Bronfen - about how we are culturally blinded to how the representation of women's deaths are everywhere.

It's a bit of surprise as it reads like the sort of essay de Quincey might have written but less light-hearted.

The final section questions how the discovery of the body might have affected the lives of one of the girls that found the body. It was discovered by a father walking with his two young daughters. And it delves into questions around that.

This is a powerful collection. Astonishingly confident and mature for a first collection.

True crime does not encourage grief, it encourages fetishistic interest, it cultivates our fascination with death, while also enabling an obsession devoid of empathy. As a single, deviant, unnameable woman, Isdal treads the line between 'like us' and 'unlike us' perfectly."

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How unethical seeking pain to exonerate your deep // unremarkable.” Loved Susannah Dickey’s debut poetry collection Isdal, strange and bold and endlessly provocative. Taking the infamous Isdal Woman, a still-unidentified woman found dead in Norway in 1970, and a podcast about the case, Dickey probes the murkiest depths of the true crime genre: its ethical, aesthetic, and ideological underpinnings. In doing so, Dickey is meditating even wider on how we as a society consume and ransack sites of violence against women and their bodies. The second part is a fragmentary, lyrical essay, considering writers such as Maggie Nelson, Lorrie Moore, Winnicott and Bataille, to muse on empathy and narrative as it relates to an exploitative, dubious medium. Dickey is incredibly precise in her constructions of language and image: “In a city on Norway's coast there's a grave untouched by lineage. / A single member's club with hidden entry and no signage.” “(Little by little they're unravelling her mystery's disorder.)” And there’s the series of ‘Outtake’ and ‘Digression’ poems, which are as incendiary as they are darkly comic: “He offers her some lasagna. She smiles and says, Yes. / He says, I hope our podcast passes the béchamel test.” “The flashes of insight that come in poetry can't absolve / us of our ignorance, she says. / Did you come up with that? he says, It's amazing. / No, it was someone else, she says. I'm just paraphrasing.” It’s a rare treat to read an entire collection of poetry that impresses often, on formal, linguistic, and intellectual levels, but Isdal is exactly that. “Plug the holes in your head with wet sheets to keep the spiders out.”!!!

[Lilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This captured me in ways I wasn't quite expecting. A beautiful poetic commentary on life, death and the meaning of it all. Susannah Dickey captured me and refused to let me go until the last page and beyond.
I was already familiar with the case before reading this, in fact that's what encouraged me to pick this up from the National Poetry Day Recommendations, but I feel like going in blind to this discussion about true crime, women and death would be equally as thought provoking!
Can't wait to hear more from this Poet!

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

“They can’t get her consent, so in it’s place, they’ll take yours”

4.5 stars

I'll admit, it took me a little time to get into the writing style (although that may just be me, because I don't read poetry that much). But I really enjoyed this, and the points and criticisms the author made, especially the section on how True Crime purports to help victims, but ends up exploiting them even more.

[Jasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

in the vein of 'Penance', it's great to see another literary exploration of the True Crime world - this is one that is both outwardly critical and self-reflexively analytical of our own complicities, our pre-disposed fascinations etc. I think what this book does exceptionally well is to be comfortable with failure in a sense - that this is a text of questions without answers, with a changing "I" that constantly probes their own positionality.

[Judith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not hugely impressed. Her facts about this case are accurate enough. I don’t like her English - she uses a lot of words I needed to Google to make sure I knew what she was talking about, but I couldn’t be bothered. I know this is her first book of poetry, but I felt she was trying to be clever. Nor am I keen on ‘poems’ that are written as paragraphs - hope that makes sense, I have come across this before. I won’t be keeping this book.

[Jakub · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s amazing poetry but I’m gonna have to reread it when i’ve flexed out my vocabulary.
All jokes aside, it’s truly amazing commentary on the true crime genre and the points Susannah makes actually hit.

[Renee Eshel · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really liked this - it had some fucking beautiful lines in it, i loved how she blended prose/ poetry/ history, and gave me a lot of inspo for my irp. i liked how sharp and bloody it was - we’re getting closer w the research, but still not the same as when i read gatwood for the first time …

[juliet · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Meredith Ellington · Rating 4 out of 5]

a thoughtful analysis of a mysterious woman and a delicious evisceration of the true crime industrial complex

[Thembe Mvula · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Grayce · Rating 5 out of 5]

my all time favorite read. i will continue to recommend this book to every person i get my hands on.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - enjoyed first section. lovvvvved second section. third section kinda passed me by. adore susannah dickey though and her language in this was excellent.

[Maeve]

Very interesting concept and really good debut collection!

[leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

enjoyed meditation on true crime

[Chloe Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
The beginning started to annoy w all the rhyming couplets but when it transitioned into prose in the last two parts it really started to hit for me. Very interesting look at the subject matter