Sundress Reads: Review of The Adorable Knife

Jessica Purdy’s Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023) is a striking collection of poems about murder. After Frances Glessner Lee’s “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” dioramas, each poem in Adorable Knife is paired with a carefully constructed miniature crime scene. Lee, who crafted the dioramas, was a pioneer of forensic science. The Nutshells were meant as a training device, as explained in Lee’s own words with the epigraph of the first poem in the Adorable Knife collection: “The investigator must bear in mind that he has a twofold responsibility—to clear the innocent as well as to expose the guilty. He is seeking only the facts—the Truth in a Nutshell.”

Purdy’s poems explore scenes of stark violence and death from fresh and captivating perspectives. “Three Room Dwelling,” for instance, is partially from the point of view of the gun and partially from the point of view of a wife (who has either been murdered, or committed murder and suicide):

“A spent shell. He used his gun rarely,

but I knew he knew how. When I entered

our marriage, I was shiny. A box full

of new ammunition. The bullets nestled

in like little sardines. Flashy. I thought

I’d never run out of gunpowder.

[…]

If it was him, I don’t know. I’m dead

and he’s dead and so is my baby. Last

thing I knew he was alive. We were lying

in bed. I had put the baby to sleep.

She had fussed. I was exhausted.” (Purdy 21)

Throughout Adorable Knife, Purdy uses unique perspectives and techniques to creep into the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” dioramas. She explores the why’s and who done it’s of these grisly true crime scenes. The two perspectives of “Three Room Dwelling” intertwine and overlap in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between the wife and the gun, mirroring the way the perpetrator of the crime is indistinguishable. “Red Bedroom” plays with being from the perspective of the suspected killer, and “Saloon and Jail” is a found poem of lines Purdy found on whiskey bottle labels. Each poem is a masterclass in weaving form, content, style, and vocabulary into a cohesive piece of true craft.

Purdy’s exploration of Lee’s composites also impressed me in the way each poem carried Lee’s perspective. We are invited by the first poem, “A Sestina by Frances Glessner Lee” to place her as the narrator, or at least part of the narration, in each of the following poems. We are invited to observe, as the reader, almost as if we are one of Lee’s students, listening to her gently nudge us into discoveries and conclusions about each crime. We aren’t, however, directly given the answers. In “Two-Story Porch,” a poem about a scene of a woman who fell from a balcony, Purdy writes:

“[…] But on close inspection

you can see the nail loosened from the railing

as if a force had been strong enough to push the wood

from the flooring with a squeal as metal extracted

from wood. She had protested against

his need for her to follow his religion. A King

needs to punish. Humiliate. His balcony

where he imagined speaking to his people.” (28)

What other assumption can you draw, given that evidence, than that he pushed her? And yet, we are not told she was pushed. Just as Lee’s composite does not tell the studying detectives the answer, but asks them to observe the crime scene and solve the crime for themselves. The narrator of these poems is both Lee—painting the scene with carefully placed evidence, subtle hints and loosened nails—and a student, interpreting those signs.

Poetry about violence has to work especially hard to be engaging, to be something other than gratuitous or farcical. Purdy does an excellent job of making the poems in Adorable Knife about more than just the violence of these crime scenes. Murder becomes something almost sensuous, the violence monstrous but the scene rendered in exquisite, tender detail. A fascination inherent in the narration invites the reader to be engrossed by the narrator’s meticulous composition, more than the murder or violence. This isn’t a cop show, like SVU or Criminal Minds, it’s a 60 Minutes interview with someone who has made the aftermath of violence, the piecing together of why and who and when and where their obsession.

Adorable Knife is almost like a game of Clue, masterfully rendered in verse. I was sucked in and invited to walk through the rooms of Frances Glessner Lee’s “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” dioramas marking down scraps of evidence–ach scrap a post-it note for my wall to be re-arranged and tacked together until a solution presents itself. I will enjoy returning this collection again and again.

The Adorable Knife is available from Grey Book Press

Nic Job is a queer writer with their MFA from DePaul University and a constant curiosity for the world—cultures, places, people, and themself. They are a human who loves humans, and all of their tangled-up ordinariness. Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is published in Club Plum, Defunct Magazine, Spare Parts Literary, and other magazines.