Dear Ted

by Kim Vodicka

If people were still banning and burning books, Vodicka's Dear Ted would be at the top of the shortlist. Lars Von Trier will option this book. Pasolini would be proud.
-Kim Göransson, photography and music production at feral sleep study
Vodicka's Dear Ted is not a genuflecting murder ballad. It's not a hyperbolic elegy to the cult of personality that exists around a spectral boogeyman in pleated slacks. It IS a ferocious take-no-prisoners deconstruction of the sycophantic idol worship that grows like kudzu around killers that often obscures the survivors, victims, and vindicators. Vodicka is the definition of fearless. A poet who wields words like hammers and metaphors like lead pipes in the hands of angels. A not-to-be-missed collection.
-S.A. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland
With Dear Ted, Vodicka grabs her hot pink poetry brush and paints important feminine energy all over the often male-focused world of serial killers. It's a collection that offers poignant statements on violence against women in art and pop culture. Dear Ted takes the power away from men, both serial killers and serial daters alike. It's a killer read and an empowering one, too.
-Gina Tron, true crime staff writer for Oxygen and author of Suspect, Employment, and Star 67
Results of the autopsy are Kim Vodicka is the real killer, slaying with necromantic wordplay illegal in most states, including the states of denial, arousal & psychosis.
-Jack Skelley, author of Fear of Kathy Acker
Vodicka's feral wit and fetishistic wordplay don't just sugarcoat her bitter pills of lacerating truth; they seduce you and wreck your defenses as she smears period blood on the valorization of misogynistic monsters and vivisects the rancid romantic carnage committed by the sociopathic shitshows that walk among us. But if it's wrong to be turned on by this poetic orgy of nightmares and accusations, I don't know how to be right.
-Cody Goodfellow, Wonderland Book Award-winning author of Unamerica and All-Monster Action
It is impossible to choose between the three "circles" presented in Vodicka's electrifying collection Dear Ted. Every section of this book is dangerous, chaotic, and compulsory. Every poem is an essential marriage of brutal honesty and elaborate humor. -Gabriel Ricard, author of Bondage Night and Disgruntled Columnist
Vodicka relentlessly probes emotional violence in this long-form, experimental poem, inflicting on the reader what destructive relationships do to the women involved. The book requires a commitment to gross anatomy, mental gymnastics, breaking one's own hall of mirrors about the harm we cause, request and inflict. "Do you know how much work / goes into revisiting the scene / of a murder?" Vodicka asks as a demand, as she fearlessly confesses her crimes committed and consumed.
-Nettie Zan Powers, author of Victimless Crime

202 pages, Paperback

Published June 14, 2022

About the author

Kim Vodicka is the spokesbitch of a degeneration, "a softer-spoken, more genteel Lydia Lunch," according to The Houston Press. For the past decade, she has toured the country performing sound poetry in bookstores, dive bars, art galleries, cafes, diners, festivals, pinup clubs, vintage clothing shops, rooftops, backyards, and places of worship. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections—Aesthesia Balderdash (Trembling Pillow Press, 2012), Psychic Privates (White Stag Publishing, 2018), and The Elvis Machine (CLASH Books, 2020). She is also the creator of a poetic comic book series, a chapbook of sound poems on vinyl, and an illustrated book of poetry. Originally from south Louisiana, she currently lives in Memphis, TN with her beloved cat, Lula. Cruise her at kimvodicka.com.

Reviews

[Nelson Pyles · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a book that references Ted Bundy, this is not a book directly about Ted. It's more about giving the victims their power and agency back. In fact, this is less of a book of poetry about a murderer and more a book that kills the murderer.
Poetically.
Kim Vodicka is a poet with a lot of gravity and gravitas. If you read The Elvis Machine (which is where I first discovered her work) you know you're in for a ride. What makes her such a force of nature is the way she slings words like a gunslinger. She has deadly accuracy and almost never misses. This is not work for the faint of heart. It's rough and tumble. It's a wake up call to arms. If there's a revolution coming, Kim will be in the front. Follow her, she knows where it's going.

[Gina Tron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Ted takes the serial killer genre and turns it on its head. WAAAAAAY more than a breakup book or take on serial killers, this is a fascinating commentary on gender and predatory behavior. One that any female-identifying person will likely be able to relate to.

[Lyam White · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a voice that recalls (and references) Lautreamont (but to more purposeful deconstructive ends), Vodicka explores the permeable membrane between desire and violence with an incongruous mix of irony and vulnerability that is utterly her own. A propulsive, cringe-y (in the best way!) read.

[Peter Marra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant work that delves into the mind of the male serial killer from the female perspective. Not for the faint-hearted.

[Dunaway Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Ted is an amazing poetry collection from Kim Vodicka. Her work continues to read like a literary post modern Bette Davis. As someone who has read the book and seen Miss Vodicka perform material from the book, this is a book that will hit the very core of those who read it. It is not poetry for everyone, but good literature is not always meant for everyone. It has little in common with the Romantic poets of old in terms of style but has everything in common in terms of intent. Miss Vodicka is a definitive voice in the ever growing independent poetry scene that has been springing up across the country for the past ten years. And like the Beats before them, they take no prisoners in their writing. And Kim Vodicka definitely takes no prisoners!

[Ezhno Martín · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are reading this book - if you are even entertaining the notion of reading this book - you are a victim who refuses to embrace victimhood as anything more than a bloody kiss of misadventure. You have played with dead things both out of morbid perversion and an unshakeable belief that life can never be extinguished as long as there is memory and imagination. Imagination is your best friend because it has to be, but you haven't stopped wishing yourself into existence. One day someone will see you as something more than meat, but until then you are tenderizing yourself with laughter love for discarded things. You would be assuredly delicious if someone decided to consume you, and you have cut yourself for many reasons that include tasting what you have become. You want to live inside someone, and if that means being eaten, so be it.

The style that this book is written in is intentionally intense and dense. There is a reason so few lines fit on each page, and that is because it is filling in the gaps in a story you already know - imagine the Marquis de Sade offering suggestions to Donald Barthelme's Snow White. You will misread every line the first time as your expectations and memory are twisted by the sing song pornography that doubles as proverb and prophecy.

Prophecy... it's too true for the faint hearted who hate themselves to like.

But I love it because it's courageous in ways I'm incapable of - it address the desperation to be loved by despicable things at any cost, and it disarms the oppression of dehumanization and destruction with hypersexuality that is overpoweringly sweet because it is limitless in its creativity.

Only sick people will love this book, and in loving it, they will get closer to well.

[John Christie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Ted is a book filled with visceral, graphic, saddening, and empowering descriptions of how we destroy ourselves for our ideas of what love should be and how we overcome the consequences of those actions.

"We are only as worthy and valuable as the way we treat our feet
The truth is
Even if I packed sensible shoes,
I wouldn't wear them. "

The book offers plenty of jaded perspective on what love is, and how it tends to turn out for the victim that falls for the words of the perpetrator who hurts them.

"There's really no difference between falling in love and killing a bitch.
Murder may be senseless without being needless.
Murder needn't be needless to be senseless."

What do we put up with from those we fall for? What excuses do we extend to them? How do we twist the truth to suit our narrative of true love?

"We coped with the violence by trying to find kindness in it."

What do we become in the process of losing ourselves in a toxic love? How stripped down do we let ourselves get?

"I became-
A pair of tits, blindfolded.

A vandalized body in 2D.

A pair of neck holes, secreting."


All in all, I think this was an excellent read that is at times funny, at times goes way too far, at times quite sad. In the end, maybe we can all make it out of toxic love without blood on our hands. She sure didn't.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kim Vodicka's Dear Ted expands upon the themes of her last collection, The Elvis Machine. It is rude, profane, in your face, and I absolutely love it! It is a book that will enrage some, enthrall others, and give no fucks about who feels what. It is everything great literature should be! I have read the book twice and have recommended it to every friend I think will enjoy this book. Kim Vodicka continues to be one of the best indie writers on the scene today. Dear Ted is a step in the best direction and I cannot wait to see what Vodicka does next.

[Downward · Rating 1 out of 5]

a book of poetry that uses ted bundy as a metaphor for the casually evil things that men do to women and the ways that internalized misogyny creates responses in those women, all of which I'm on board with thematically but aesthetically this just wasn't for me, which I suppose is the way with transgressive work like this. it either hits you really hard or it doesn't work for you.