Dear Ted (OUT NOW)- Kim Vodicka
Official Release June 2022
Dear Ted is a hybrid work of poetic diatribes and erotic horrorscapes with elements of true crime and autobiography. It’s about Ted Bundy, but it’s not about Ted Bundy. It’s the laugh of the medusa. It exorcises and autopsies. The book is pro-victim and pro-survivor and privileges these perspectives as it explores the complex and often contradictory intrapersonal psychology of abuse and trauma. For its duration, Vodicka addresses a depersonalized, disembodied version of Bundy, stripping him of his perceived power and assuming it for her own, in this transcription of primal scream therapy.
"Dear Ted is a long ‘letter’ to Bundy, or someone like him, or others like them, but it’s not about them. It’s about de-centering, disarming, and dismantling them. These men have much to answer for. If I could communicate with him (them) and demand accountability (or die trying, or kill trying), this book is what I’d have to say."
—Kim Vodicka
"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 writer for Oxygen and author of Suspect, Employment, and Star 67
"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
Kim Vodicka is the spokesbitch of a degeneration and author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, The Elvis Machine (CLASH Books, 2020) and Dear Ted (Really Serious Literature, 2022). She also writes erotica and her short story, A Dirty Story as You Like It, was published in 2021 as part of the Pocket Erotica Series by New Urge Editions. She is the creator of several experimental chapbooks, including a poetic comic book, a 7” vinyl EP of sound poems, and a book of poetry illustrated by various artists local to Memphis. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of artist grants from PEN America, Poets & Writers, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Authors League Fund. Her poems, prose, and visual art have been featured in The Thought Erotic, New Urge Reader, SPREAD, Forbidden Futures, OOMPH, Be About It, Best American Experimental Writing, Nasty! and many others. For the past decade, she has toured the nation performing spoken word with musical accompaniment in venues both illustrious and disreputable, including the legendary Sun Studio. Originally from South Louisiana, she lives in Memphis, Tennessee with her beloved cat, Lula. Cruise her at kimvodicka.com.
