Decay Never Came

by David Kuhnlein

"You are a shadow eroded by rock"
Decay Never Came is the debut chapbook by David Kuhnlein, a poet in tune with the beautiful underbelly of the world - its necroses, its splendid withering, its decay. This collection also features six original collages by Kuhnlein, inspired by scenes from Medieval paintings.

Genres: Poetry

46 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2023

About the author

David Kuhnlein writes fiction, poetry, and criticism. He is the author of Ezra's Head, Bloodletter, Die Closer to Me, Decay Never Came, and Six Six Six (horror film reviews). He co-edited the horror anthology Lizard Brain and hosts a reading series at Cafe 1923 in Hamtramck. He lives in Michigan and is online @princessbl00d.

Reviews

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

GO FULL POLTERGEIST

David Kuhnlein. Decay Never Came. Maximus Books, 2023. 36 pages.

The text of this chapbook is less than forty pages long but it can’t be read in a hurry. It can’t be gobbled up like a small package of black licorice. Slow down and take each line in one by one. You are now reading at the slowest setting of the necro-metronome. The book’s title is Decay Never Came so you have to jump into a different, longer timescale to get what the poems are doing, and even then you may not. There’s a strong atmosphere of aesthetic death throughout the collection, the beauty in death, or maybe more accurately, the beauty of a body’s biological trajectory plus inevitable time. “Herniated before I was biology, in decay that never came,” Kuhnlein writes in the titular poem. And maybe it didn’t, but was perhaps expected to since we have passed into the empirical envelope of death. Bodies, in Kuhnlein’s world, are sites for exhibiting value-neutral damage, illness, injury. In “Wooden Spoon,” the speaker of the poem likens bruises suffered in BDSM encounters to stars, saying “I’d let you whack an entire history of / hot white stars // the galaxies in me! & isn’t it funny / how pleasure w/in pain / & not the other way around surrounds / me // w/ pieces of the everyday”

In “Bloodborne” we seem to eavesdrop on a corpse asking “is this a body bag or a river I’m in”:

My fingerprints dehisce their perimeter
Like psychotropics darting through blood
Red ants bite me in swells of cursive
Relatives’ prayers teem, gleaning as they flay
I’m stuffed into a burlap sack…
The weak taxidermy of my surname thaws
Ashes melt up my knuckles without me

A morbid tone pervades the collection, which is nothing new, but what tends toward the original about Kuhnlein’s writing is the spectacular variety of phraseology about bodies in extremity, the chorus of voices singing about rot, abuse, or even just some other living morphology. Several poems describe sea lifeforms with a fascination that is not as gothic as the rest of the productions might be (to resort to idiotic shorthand: “gothic” is a term prone to some of the worst misprision and I apologize for using it here—and yet Kuhnlein is unquestionably macabre). Starfish, sand dollars, and seahorses have dreams shaped by anatomy known to science but alien to human creatures. “Pacific townsfolk crave my cross-shaped uteri,” the sand dollar apostrophizes. It isn’t clear whether the speaker in “Starfish” is a starfish or is addressing a starfish, but some form of relationship is being referenced:

My bag of blotted capillaries eversible inside my oral disk
I scarf your milk teeth, suction cup shoes, and pillowcase tongues
My weeping thirst carves a singular grave
For us in this ruin of beach sans melody
As the cackling sun crisps your tendons to mine, alphabetically

Kuhnlein’s vocab choices have just enough clarity to meaningfully refer to things but just enough reverb to put you under a cloak. A somnolent gel floods all spaces, like that seen in the surreal cover photography for old 4AD records or in Brothers Quay animations. You’re having a nightmare but it’s hypnotizing in its beauty and the really bad part hasn’t happened yet. It’s an atmospheric buildup.

Kuhnlein recently wrote a short zine’s worth of film reviews, horror movies, called Six Six Six, and his facility with coming up with fresh, engaging language was on display there as it is here. But the poetry is perhaps hazier because the goals are more abstract than “communicating to you about some more or less fixed popular culture.” Writing that can swerve into the territory of spooky phantasmagoria and still come back out as original is not so easy to come by. Decay Never Came does manage to have the lineaments of that. My main criticism of the collection is that it might have had too much the lifespan of a gentle moth as opposed to some organism that was more robust and sustained over time. Chapbooks are like micro-ghosts trying to scare up a living room when what Kuhnlein needs is to unleash a poltergeist, something destructive that breaks doors, shatters mirrors, melts fireplaces, inspires more elemental fears. But, I have yet to go to the Béla Kiss-ing booth that Kuhnlein has apparently been constructing (Kiss being the notorious Hungarian child-murderer), so there’s a lot I don’t know yet about his broader work. Maybe I don’t want to see Kuhnlein go full poltergeist.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brief, powerful poems scuttling among the inchoate inhabitants of tide pools and boneyards. Connections made at odd angles. Metamorphosis in extremis.

[Kyle Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read David Kuhnlein’s Decay Never Came three times in a row.

Not because I couldn’t penetrate the dense prose, though the work exposes new pulsating tendons with each read-through. I sat down to read the book, pen in hand to jot a few notes. An hour later, I found myself brimming with somatic inklings and wild images. And the page of my notebook empty of anything but David’s name and the chapbook’s punchy title.

So I read it again. This time with a focus on notes, on pulling some of the most impactful little moments from the swirl of images and sketched pieces of our anatomies. I started on-course, jotting a few quick phrases that bit into me. And again I lost myself in Kuhnlein’s words, forgetting my own.

Whether the supposedly familiar site of the pieces of our person, the bits of flesh that make us, or the familiar in the routines and fleeting moments of daily life, Kuhnlein finds the flash of the surprising. The poetic lick that gives the images some other-worldly glow.

In poems such as “Nothing to Work On” Kuhnlein finds the little moments of the everyday, the banalities we often overlook, and paints them across the page with a resplendent pop, transforming them into unique and interesting shapes and hues. Abstractions of the familiar in ways Frank O’Hara would be ecstatic about.

There are times the somatic overwhelms the rational narrative of the poem, the reader loses themselves in the orgiastic flailing of limbs and dribbling organs. Lines such as “I don’t feel anything above my stitches. Beefy men ate my wallet, proving to be crisp. Watching them suck milk from rocks, I buried my eggs within” seem to soar into strange, unreal worlds. But Kuhnlein is guiding us through our own weirdness, the composition and functioning of our bodies, the spaces we occupy with them.

Reading the book a third time, Kuhnlein’s language had eaten away at my own. Lines like “Skin flayed into the dream I knew I’d have here once,” touch on multitudes my analysis could never begin to broach. Go read Kuhnlein’s book, your brain and your body will thank you.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has so many lines that give me chills, like little somatic gifts, the space between the reader and the text never smaller. “Not even this musculature - a honeycomb of taste buds, / Water bugs, animal curves, deflated, lungs - / Could soften the sphincter between our hug…” After reading “The inside of your body / Remains unknown without violence” I said out loud “oh my god.” This book reminds readers that the body is an ocean of language. “…it’s impossible to see your own eyeball…” and the poems of Decay Never Came reveal what that might be like. There’s also excellent poem-collages (or collage-poems?) deployed through the book that further entwine the text and body, asking the reader to turn the book, their head, or both, to be engaged with. What a visceral, phenomenal first collection of poems!