Ripper!
By: Carl Jay Buchanan.
Series: The James Dickey contemporary poetry series
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Columbia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 67
Subjects: Jack, the Ripper -- Poetry.; Serial murders -- Poetry.; Whitechapel (London, England) -- Poetry.
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: A note on Carl Buchanan and Ripper!; title: Introduction to the Ripper; title: Jacks to open; title: Victims; title: Note on ripperology; title: Suspects: facts and theories; title: The butcher; title: The priest; title: The poet; title: The psychic; title: The physician; title: The prince; title: Memoir of the man who caught the Ripper; title: Afterjacks.