Doll Studies: Forensics

by Carol Guess

Based on The Nutshell Studies Of Unexplained Death, crime scene dioramas photographed by Corinne Botz, Carol Guess adds sound to the stillness of Frances Glessner Lee's bloodstained rooms.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published March 6, 2012

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

HAPPY POETRY MONTH!

april is national poetry month,
so here come thirty floats!
the cynics here will call this plan
a shameless grab for votes.
and maybe there’s some truth to that—
i do love validation,
but charitably consider it
a rhyme-y celebration.
i don’t intend to flood your feed—
i’ll just post one a day.
endure four weeks of reruns
and then it will be may!

**************************
genius. what a wonderful idea: poetry based on the dioramas created by frances glessner lee back in the 40's and 50's to help train forensic detectives in the art of crime-scene interpretation. have you seen these things? they are incroyable. tiny little details with tiny little dolls and tiny little bottles and ropes and shoes and lamps. each one a crime scene. i have this book: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, that you should go out and get. and then you should read this book of poems which does an excellent job of humanizing these scenes.

i have gallantly taken photos of some of the scenes from my copy of the nutshell studies of unexplained death and typed out the corresponding poem. sorry for any loss of detail with my tiny camera, and you're welcome.

You're going to kill her. At least give her legs. She's drinking from a shard of glass, bloomers cycling in rigor mortis. Pink garters chasten knitted stockings. A piece of soap pines for her dirt. Sauced on gin, perhaps she slipped. Stiff legs suggest she stiffened elsewhere. Dinner tasted of its tinfoil cover. Wainscoting grasps the tub in its fist. Gentlemen friends brought gin to her room, but somehow 'Dark Bathroom' is the scene of the crime. She's open-ended. You can see up her skirt. No doubt she's finished to the last doll pat. She's swimming upside-down in flounces, drunk on water, the last thing she'll taste. She'll never listen to Sousa's opus. Plessy v. Ferguson upholds the law.

The cabin was ours all winter. You paid for this, the sleek word 'mistress'. I touched the gun because the gun touched you. I swear I didn't do it, although your hair was something I could have. While you were sleeping I cut it, true. If they search my house they'll find you in boxes, sweaters that smell of the way you walked. The shot came from behind. I heard her sigh into the job. Your wife had insurance; she made sure of that. Last to see you, I'm under suspicion. My prints aren't on the ammunition.

Here's the dollhouse wife asleep, night's chores finished in miniature. What hangs above the infant's head is red. I mean the way graffiti moves through trains, signaling who's been and when. Her husband sleeps beside her on the floor. This dollhouse lesson has to do with time. I mean the way sound travels through a house asleep. Detectives learn to sweep a story clockwise for detail. Anyone might own a gun. Pink slippers run in place atop a popcorn rug.

i love this idea. love it. even if i don't love each and every poem with all my heart, i love the concept and 93% of the execution.

long, slow, sincere applause.

come to my blog!

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intoxicating, Fascinating Concept: Carol Guess Looks At Murder

Poets find the most bizarre means of drawing our attention to life matters. The train of events that occurred because of one artist's work trickles (or rather bleeds) down into these meticulously crafted and jarring prose poems by gifted poet Carol Guess. 'DOLL STUDIES: FORENSICS is a prose poetry collection based on artwork created by Frances Glessner Lee during the 1940s. Le constructed a series of dollhouse dioramas titled "the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death". Each diorama depicts a crime scene, littered with clues that may be used to solve the crime. Lee eventually began giving seminars in forensic medicine, and is sometimes referred to as the mother of modern forensic science. "The Nutshells" are housed in Baltimore, and were rarely examined until photographer Corrine May Botz began years of research into their creation. Carol Guess developed her prose poems in response to Botz's photographs, giving voice and music to the dioramas and their dead.'

Stimulus/Response. This collection of poetic responses is divided into four parts: The Dental Arcade; So Dirty, So Fast; Departure Lounge (in 20 parts); and Lye and Lilies. The result is a coming together of poetic vision/version that represent some of the more inquisitively beautiful responses to a visual stimulus, in this case multiple scenes of crime. Some few examples follow:

Kicks

You're going to kill her. At least give her legs. She's drinking
from a shard of glass, bloomers cycling in rigor mortis. Pink
garters chasten knitted stockings. A piece of soap pines for
her dirt. Sauced on gin, perhaps she slipped. Stiff legs suggest
she stiffened elsewhere. Dinner tasted of its tinfoil cover.
Wainscoting grasps the tub in its fist. Gentlemen friends
brought gin to her room, but somehow 'Dark Bathroom' is the
scene of the crime. She's open-ended. You can see up her skirt.
No doubt she's finished to the last doll pat. She's swimming
upside-down in flounces, drunk on water, the last thing she'll
taste. She'll never listen to Sousa's opus. Plessy v. Ferguson
upholds the law.

Girl on Wheels

Her story begins with Seconal. Her husband did it, another
doll. She kicked off her heels by a borrowed bed. Pin-ups dodge
the date by years. The bed's on wheels. The missing man might
come to call when light dissolves on concrete lawns. The idea
is not to solve the crime. Color and texture form the prelude to
meaning. The idea is to see as at a museum. Kisses on a pillow
give the crime away.

Littleton, Now Bethlehem

The cabin was ours all winter. You paid for this, the sleek word
'mistress'. I touched the gun because the gun touched you. I
swear I didn't do it, although your hair was something I could
have. While you were sleeping I cut it, true. If they search
my house they'll find you in boxes, sweaters that smell of the
way you walked. The shot came from behind. I heard her sigh
into the job. Your wife had insurance; she made sure of that.
Last to see you, I'm under suspicion. My prints aren't on the
ammunition.

As Carol Guess moves through these captured images of things wrong, things gone awry, things that smell of crime she seduces us with her intelligent and sensitive eye, able to transform horror into tolerable poetry. She takes us into those realms where most dare not tread - that very thin line that demarcates life and death, just before one or the other wins/loses. This is a brilliant idea,a brave attempt to make the unimaginable imaginable. it works so very well.

Grady Harp

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I picked up this book I knew it was poetry based on actual crimes, miniature doll-house crime-scene dioramas created to help train detectives new in the field. But what I didn't realize is that the photography of those dioramas was published as a book: The nutshell studies of unexplained death. I should have requested both books together at the same time. But in a way, I'm kind of glad I read the poetry first, without the visual aid of the photographs. Reading the poetry alone really made me work for the meaning, it really slowed me down and forced me to read each poem twice, sometimes more, to understand the full meaning.

The poetry is written in prose, but it still has powerful imagery, unexpected lyrical qualities, and very precise and concise phrasings. It was deceivingly simple, haunting in execution, and horrifying in subject matter. Then it all comes back to the reality, which is a small, quiet scene of a room with a doll. To appreciate the full scope, be sure to also check out Karen's review.

I had to include a couple of the poems here. Enjoy!

The Double Doll
Frank Harris gets two dolls. Why's he so special? He's sleeping
on cement. Beside him in a cell tomorrow's Frank lies dead.
Between breathing and dying Frank loses his cap. Dock Street's
suspended, waiting for Harvard's pennant. Longshoremen
practice stevedore lashing, binding Boston's barrels to barges.
Things fall from the sky every day without warning. What
struck from above left no trace of blood. Frank returned to
stopper knots, no time to nurse a bump on the head. Who
doesn't see stars dockside at night on a clandestine run to dump
dunnage off deck? Two Franks aligned shims and hoisted rope:
visible docker and invisible corpse.

Cake, With Corpse
The kigthcen's perfection belies its weapon. Gas jets open as
wrists in a tub, filling me with peace because I'm only watching.
I stand above the diorama, magnifying glass to scene. Castles
paper cardboard walls, a story not in words but things.
Housewife sprawls, stiff-limbed in skirt. There should be a
mouse, at least. How holy a quiet house. A week's worth of
letters curl beneath the door's bronze mouth

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I opened this book wanting desperately to love it, but to me the poems were a bit hit-or-miss. When they hit, though, they hit hard.

[Liam Strong · Rating 4 out of 5]

The middle two sections of this book are so evocative and varied from the beginning and ending section they're sandwiched between that it makes those portions somewhat of a drag to sift through. That said, the research and source material from which Guess's poems are based off of is remarkably fascinating, and the form she takes on with very sonic, musical consonance in her prose poems makes this collection such a gem. If you're willing to indulge in the original source material from Frances Glessner Lee, this collection of poems will be well worth the ekphrastic representation Guess invokes.

[Taryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

With life a crime scene, Carol Guess is the reader's CSI pro, "schooled in miniatures", and challenging "the things we knew" in order "to know again". Doll Studies: Forensics is a "story not in words but things", and Guess' "objects always tell the truth". Like a "drunken rifle" or the "rust [that] dogs the rails", Guess' inanimates dress in human qualities where there is no longer human life, bearing witness or accomplice to crimes of every gruesome, lustful, and methodical kind. Prose portraits the unthinkable ends to lives very possibly and plausibly like one's very own, though "filling me [the reader] with peace because I'm only watching". Part Two: So Dirty, So Fast, reinforces Guess' hold to detail, shielding the reader from the futility of asking why, focusing on the "facts stacked like dishes", so ordinary and frighteningly real. An arresting read.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this so much more than I did. I was mostly meh on the collection, honestly. A few were awesome, most were blah. And some had the most ostentatious alliteration I've seen in a dog's age. Why so aggressive with the alliteration?

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only thing that would make this book better is if the pictures of the doll crime scenes were included. The author used the pictures to compose the poems and it would be great to have them side by side.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is like nothing I've ever read. An amazing concept: poems about miniature crime scene dioramas. And the execution of this idea: BAM! Powerful, gut wrenching, imaginative, haunting.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection of prose poems.

[Christina M Rau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eerie and delightfully odd, these prose poems offer alliterative imagery that unfolds like a murder mystery. Deserves a second reading, and then a third.