Published in 2018
80 pages
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.
What is this book about?
Doe began as author Aimee 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.
“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
