Haunted by Incompleteness: Niina Pollari Reviews Conor Hultman's DOE

There’s a famous maxim about books and their covers. Maybe you know it? But the book being reviewed here—DOE by Conor Hultman (Cloak, 2026)—basically demands you notice its physicality before all else. At over 600 pages, this book is like a thick-necked, stern bouncer whose sheer physical bulk makes you consider whether you really want to enter the forbidding-looking club he so stoically guards. The rest of the book’s exterior is ominous also—the black cover is unadorned except for the title, the O of which contains a pixelated human face; there are no blurbs; there’s not even an author attribution. But really, the shocking thing is the book’s size. Name one other contemporary collection of poetry that asserts its bigness like this. Poetry volumes, by and large, are slim; 600 pages typically represents a lifetime of work.

Perhaps DOE is, in fact, a collected works of sorts. Conceptual through and through, it takes as source material the descriptions from the Doe Network, a website for “assisting investigating agencies in bringing closure to national and international cold cases concerning Missing & Unidentified Persons.” The descriptions used as source material are written by many different individuals, and though Hultman flattens them somewhat with some light typographical changes and formatting (“and” becomes “&,” “with” becomes “w/,” and so forth; apostrophes are all removed and the text is all in lowercase; prose paragraphs are split into poetry), the text is otherwise unedited. The typographic choices make the content feel darkly continuous and conversational, like overhearing snippets of grim chatter, or guiltily reading someone’s text messages.

Before we get too far into the poetry of DOE, though, let me provide some additional context about the source. The Doe Network is a website that catalogues unidentified missing people, sometimes deceased, sometimes living. It’s a 90s-internet-core, function-before-form source where a team of volunteers meticulously writes out all the available information about found-but-unidentified people in hopes that someone will discover something relevant (a personal effect, a tattoo, a meaningful location) about a missing person in their own life, and come forward with information that will help to identify the individual in the description. The Doe Network has assisted in the resolution of dozens of cold cases, bringing closure to the families of at least 143 missing people so far (you can also read about these resolutions on the site). The descriptions, written by different people and largely unstandardized, include identifying information about the victims, such as articles of clothing, circumstances of discovery, and the geographical location where they were discovered, as well as the police department or jurisdiction that oversees the case.

The experience of the site is as visceral as it is functional; you can browse the database geographically or chronologically, but whichever entry point you choose, soon you’ll be confronted with a vast, scrollable list of people of whom few details are known. The astounding thing about the Doe Network is the sheer number of people on it. There are thousands of profiles of unidentified people awaiting identification, awaiting resolution. Browsing the database is emotionally heavy because it’s all a bunch of open loops with no closure, and also because most often, terrible things have befallen the subject being described. So the shocking size of DOE the book parallels the facts of its source material: violence in America is ongoing and vast, and its related incidents are numerous, and sometimes we don’t know anything else other than that someone was found and something bad happened to bring them to the place where they were discovered. It’s destabilizing to realize that these are all people who once were living and loved, and whose fates are now unknown by people in their original lives. DOE, the physical book, needs to be huge to convey something systemic, something awful in its very scale, the banal grandness of its brutality. It’s also heavy in literal weight, clocking in at nearly two pounds (this I can verify; I did place it on my kitchen scale for research). 

But OK, now we’ve talked about the physical presence and context of the book. Time for the contents. As I mentioned, Hultman takes as source material the descriptions from the case files themselves, keeping them relatively unchanged. The individual poems work inside this volume as a cohesive collection, though the disparate voices are nevertheless noticeable if you start thinking about it for more than a couple of seconds. Some poems are small, spare, evocative, troubling:

SAINT AUGUSTINE 

 

trousers

undershorts

one shoe & one sock

 

And others detailed, almost obsessive in their desire to give context: 

 

ELLERY 

[…] 

white V neck camisole (inexpensive) manufactured in carpi

italy & non exportable 

a green 

brown

red checked trench coat (expensive)

reversible to olive drab wool 

size 40 (this size is unavailable in canada and USA

must be european 

possibly italian

as their sizes follow a different scale than european sizes) 

[…]

Both of these excerpts offer details about the vestments of their subjects, but one is focused on the plain exterior facts and the other clearly interested in the research aspect, in offering additional information that could be helpful to the reader (and also perhaps following a personal avenue of curiosity, leading the reader to wonder about the writer). You can also catch certain writers’ preferred tropes recurring—in his review at Hobart, Christian McDonough notes eleven poems that begin with the circumcision status of the individual being described. The effect of these two types of poems, and everything in between them, is a clerical chorus of sorts, a musical composition of data entered, with the different voices eliciting different types of reactions. Hultman leaves out the ages of the decedents, further equalizing them in some ways (although some can be inferred, and if you like, you can certainly search key phrases from the poems to find out more detail about others.) But my point is: in a 600-page volume, certain things repeat, and the repeats are a point of fascination.

I did not read this book in order. I chose, in fact, a map-based order starting with the states that were most meaningful to my personal life (Florida, New York, North Carolina) before branching out into the rest. In the table of contents, the poems are arranged by state. Though I didn’t do the math, it appears that the results are somewhat proportionate to state population—for instance, California has about 60 pages of poems, while North and South Dakota each have one entry. Whether you read it in order or choose your own adventure by skipping around as I did, the book is like a harrowing road trip, a long-haul truck route with stops in lonely ravines and urban waste receptacles alike. And yet there’s an intimacy about some of the descriptions:

Indiana: 

calloused hands 

large scarring from radical mastectomy on her right side

 

Nevada: 

she had given birth to at least one child

she had multiple stress ulcers in her stomach

 

Kansas: 

dark brown hair

public hair was bleached blond

Three quick examples that all reveal more than what a viewer of an alive person would register. Everywhere, bodies stripped of their identities, tossed asunder, yet someone is paying attention to the details surrounding them, if not lovingly then at least attentively; first the transcribing volunteer, then Hultman. 

DOE reminds me of Kate Durbin’s Hoarders, an equally distressing poetry collection which consists of poems that describe episodes of the eponymous television show, while also listing the possessions that are being shown onscreen. Like DOE, Hoarders shies away from the empathy porn of focusing on the subjects, letting instead the lonely circumstances of their scattered belongings contextualize their humanity. There is a key difference, though; in Durbin’s book, the people, flawed as they may be, have a human presence and a voice because they are alive and speaking for themselves. But in Hultman’s book they are, by definition, missing even though they’re there on the page; they possess a double identity and we readers only have one side of that identity. We are missing the context. Hultman lets the objects and places speak without the human, revealing a devastatingly unfinished outline of each subject, one after another in a brutal litany. Each of these poems is haunted by incompleteness. We will never get the full story of everyone in this book, or in the eponymous database. I will be honest: reading this made me feel bad, but it is also the badness that conveys its power. It’s a huge, sad book!

I was going to say something a little lighthearted about my compulsion to read this work being tied to a kind of dark nostalgia for dial-up afternoons in the ’90s. If you were a proto-internet kid like me, and grew up on the family computer browsing Rotten dot com and the other haunted arcades of the early web, you will know what I mean. (I borrowed the phrase “haunted arcade” from this great writeup about Rotten.) It used to feel like opening a door you didn’t want to open, a kind of Bluebeard situation where you risk everything to see the decapitated heads in exchange for some kind of grim knowledge, though the price is that you can never unsee it and you are forever changed. But to have nostalgia for this feeling is too close to what I dislike about the popularity of true crime, of murder rubbernecking: the titillation factor, the shock value, the “isn’t this awful?” of it all. I think DOE, while often shocking in its content, deals very little in titillation and shock. Instead, I find it respectful; the desire to contextualize this material as poetry worth examining is something that shines a flashlight on the enormity of human desperation and says look, see how huge this is, how undeniable.

Niina Pollari is the author of two poetry collections: Path of Totality (Soft Skull, 2022) and Dead Horse (Birds, LLC, 2015), and the translator, from the Finnish, of Tytti Heikkinen’s selected poems, The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal. Her next book, Risk Tolerance, will come out with Autofocus Books in February 2027. She also sometimes edits reviews for Zona Motel. She lives in Marshall, NC with her family, and she is currently reading Astrid Lindgren’s War Diaries.