Petra Kuppers. Diver Beneath the Street. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2024. 72 pages.





Petra Kuppers’ Diver Beneath the Street sets up an imagistic, fantastical world that mirrors all too closely the truth of our daily reality. In Kuppers’ latest poetry collection, murdered women, murdered identities, and murdered earth are brought together to an intersectional space in which these events seemingly transcend, perhaps transpose, time: the past, present, and future overlap and blur, which is enacted in poetic lines that deconstruct linear time, replacing it with a looped feedback. Enter the diver beneath the street. This diver must chart a path—not through forest, desert, or sea but through a landscape of serial killers and “capitalist giants,” of industrialization and “toxic runoff,” of deforestation, racism, and ableism (xii). When the diver asks, “Will you dive with me, explore the wreck, with creatures and spirits, inside and out, toward dissolve?” our answer to this invitation is yes (xii). And then we turn the page and dive.

In this terrifying, “clusterfucked fairy-tale world” the same historical violence occurs in the present, mere methods and names change (xii). Kuppers frames her collection partly around true crime including the 1967–69 Michigan Murders during which white women, mostly students, were killed as they traveled to “parties, to libraries, to the lakes” and then “left on roadsides, in gullies, on construction sites, in old barns (xii).” The poet brings the past to the present, drawing awareness to ongoing injustice and building empathy for the forgotten women who have been lost as well as those women who will be lost in the future. Yet these poems don’t only focus on psychic scars: the land beneath has “tasted blood” of “women, trans, and queer people” who have “died and [still] die by men’s violence, all in unequal precarity in a racist world (xii).” Is this the kind of modern fairy tale we are living? Have fairy tales changed from their gruesome origins, or just become more transparent and less metaphorical? For Kuppers, “the old tale keeps spinning:” in 2019 Detroit, another serial killer targeted older Black women and left their bodies in abandoned homes (xii). The horrors that Kuppers includes extend beyond individual killers—in these poems, the vulnerable intersection of identities such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability is shown as multiple possibilities for violence. This layered discrimination surfaced again during the COVID lockdown and its triage protocols, which revealed the monster at scale as an ableist society that devalues and preys on disabled and minority bodies.

As a society, we are all implicated in this layered discrimination. Within these poems, we are all implicated as divers, choosing either the deep or the shallow. As Adrienne Rich claims in “Diving into the Wreck,” “we are, I am, you are / by cowardice or courage / the one who find our way / back to this scene” to be witnesses or warriors or both. If we choose to consciously witness others’ suffering, what will we uncover? What prejudice and whose blood have seeped into our cement foundations? What innocent green things have suffocated and died below our feet in the name of progress? In the first poem, “The Diver Beneath the Street,” we learn what it means to become intimate with concrete, whether it means a bloody palm print impression or a dead body is upon it. Then we dive under; beneath this first substrate is a hellish place of surgery theaters, of gas masks placed over our mouths as we are asked to count backwards from ten. For whatever reasons—ignorance, despair, hope—we, absorbed as readerly divers, do as we’re told, breathe deep, uphold the status quo, which results in “oil smears” on our foreheads, preparation for either purification or ritual sacrifice (2). The latter seems more likely, as the “diver sucks the sugar cube,” the last sweetness before the bitter, like a horse at slaughter (2).”

Once under, other structural truths about our “clusterfucked fairy-tale world” are uncovered. When women of color, disabled and trans women go missing, a team of volunteers doesn’t rush to join the search. Instead, the women are “swallowed” by the river, by the “motorcycle wheel” that weaves necks and braids “into the spokes” as if roadkill (2-3). At this point, Kuppers enacts this vanishing through lines that begin to break down as if decaying like “rust moths filter[ing] tanning chemicals” (2-3). Kuppers reminds us that these truths have been codified as parables and fairy tales, taking us back in time to the Grimm brothers who collected and distorted women’s stories as “ethnographic practices” and “fantasy police procedural” (6). For example, the poem “Dancing Princesses” is one part innocent girls just wanting to have fun (agency) and part misogynistic persecution. When the wolves attack, when lovers deceive, when women walk into the dark to never be seen again, in keeping with a familiar logic, they are blamed for their own misfortune.    

As if writing for an episode of the CSI television show, Kuppers incriminates us as passive observers, as voyeurs who witness collection of evidence and clues, trial preparation, the princesses being accused—of what? Dancing? For sneaking out? For not listening to their elders? For dreaming of agency? Snow White, Briar Rose, Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella—so many princesses falling down “trapdoor[s]” and into magical comas, “sisters all”—share the same journey and persecution (6). Detectives follow in “invisibility cloak[s]” but don’t try to prevent any danger; instead, they act as a silent witnesses as if waiting to say I told you so and slap on the cuffs (6). But not all vanishing princesses disappear forever their first night out dancing. Some run back home in reverse chronological order, climb up trapdoors and fall into beds, and perhaps this is the true crime women are being persecuted for—surviving. Who knows? The real danger often comes in the form of soldiers that blend in with “good citizens,” the ones that seem safe enough when offering a ride (7).

These rape culture narratives get recycled again and again: on t-shirts “worn and velvet from washing” and “rain,” from “a mouse pilfer[ing] threads for its nest,” or from “a swallow shit[ing] on it” after “eating a thick furry moth” (7). By the time another Grimm’s fairy tale appears, nothing has changed. Women still want to “glide like the wild thing[s],” and women are still shamed and punished for their desires (77).

The final poem echoes the collection’s beginning: with the recurrent diver as guide, we have delved into tragedies and injustices most would have rather ignored, and now it’s time to surface, to  find relief from the onslaught. Ultimately, there is no escape from all this dark knowledge, and the diver, too, is vulnerable, and is blocked from the surface while trying to “sail up, / silver, / glossy” (82). Even outside of the world of Diver Beneath the Street, we can’t ignore what we’ve seen and expect to survive, or have our loved ones survive. The diver is forever marked by these encounters with waste dumps and climate change, deforestation and industrialization, violence and dehumanization. Kuppers enjoins us to face the monsters, the ones we help create, the ones we enable, the ones we ignore. We are all connected: “everybody dances in the draft, toe reach, tired,” and therefore, everyone is needed in order to change (82).

This collection reminds us that cycles of violence so far feel endless, submerged within the span of human history: in 1938, the Elling Woman, one of the first bog people to be discovered, is believed to have been hung as a human sacrifice in 280 BCE when she was twenty-five years old. In 2014, Drag the Red, a community volunteer organization in Manitoba was founded to bring attention to the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls by searching the Red River of the North for bodies. By approaching history with a crip aesthetic with all of intersectionality’s intensity, Kuppers points out the way we use trauma as entertainment, letting the hurt of others make us feel better about ourselves, falling into the fairy tale of what if and it could always be worse. This collection reminds us that we have developed countless ways to harm each other, to decode violence done to each other, to hold the bad guys accountable, but we’ve devalued preventative measures through sanitizing cultural narrratives.  In Diver Beneath the Street, the violence of daily life and cultural memory is intermingled with the natural world: “sanitizer rain has time to kill // any bacteria that might / have been introduced // during the mixing process. // Blunt force trauma. Yogurt, bananas, sunshine” (16)—violence, in other words, is legible everywhere. Kuppers reminds us that violence against one is violence against us all. We cannot let ourselves forget that.