Ripper! (James Dickey Contemporary Poetry)

After a hundred years, the secrets of his identity and motivation remain a mystery. But what is the heart of this legendary enigma, the self-styled Jack the Ripper, who signed one letter "Yours from Hell," enclosing with it a positively identified piece of a victim's kidney? Ripper! is a collection of dramatic, lyric, and narrative poems backed by enticing biographical facts about the man who terrorized foggy London in the autumn of 1888. This collection offers 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. Through a work that explores and defines the limits of violence in language and the soul, the reader faces the compulsive attraction of violence and is fundamentally changed.