Ripper!

by Carl Jay Buchanan

Ripper! is a collection of dramatic, lyric, and narrative poems backed by biographical facts about the man who terrorized foggy London in the autumn of 1888. Ripper! explodes the factual and more traditional boundaries set by previous works, offering six psychological portraits of the main suspects that shockingly yet precisely detail the bizarre workings of the Ripper's own mind during the act of murder. Throughout, the text explores why we are haunted by violence, why we are fascinated by this figure who remains for us the incarnation of rape and rage. The most striking feature of Ripper!, however, is the set of companion pieces to the murderer's monologues. In these poems the victims themselves - seven English prostitutes - speak frankly of their defilement and their destinies.