Bound

by Candice Wuehle

The debut book by poet Candice Wuehle, Bound is a heretical descent into the bubblegum inferno of bespoke occultism.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2018

About the author

Candice Wuehle is the author of the novel MONARCH (Soft Skull, forthcoming) as well as three collections of poetry, including FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed (11:11, 2021), BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, 2018) and Death Industrial Complex (Action Books, 2020), which is currently longlisted for The Believer Magazine Book Award. She is also a co-author of Collected Voices in the Expanded Field (11:11, 2020). Her chapbooks include VIBE CHECK (Garden-door Press, 2018), EARTH* AIR* FIRE* WATER *ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015) and cursewords: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Her work can be found in The Iowa Review, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Tarpaulin Sky, The Volta, The Colorado Review, SPORK, and The New Orleans Review.
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Candice holds an MA in literature from the University of Minnesota as well as an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She earned a doctorate in Creative Writing at The University of Kansas, where she was the recipient of a Chancellor's Fellowship. Her studies focus on the relationship between trauma, memory, and the occult. She is represented by Kiele Raymond at Thompson Literary Agency.
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Originally from Iowa City, Iowa, Candice lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her husband Andrew and their rabbit, William the Bunny.

Reviews

[Lisa Basile]

This is a poetry lover's book, of course. But it's more than that. It's genre-blurring (genre murdering, rather?) and difficult. It's fun to read, yes but it begs the reader to open themselves. The best poetry does. A glorious collection dotted with dreamy images and musical lineation. Love.

[John Trefry]

Total pure pink necro!!!

[Jesse Hilson]

BOUND. Candice Wuehle. Inside The Castle, 2018. Not paginated.

“I love to be so clear / birds / fly into me / and break their necks.” So writes Candice Wuehle in her 2018 poem BOUND, and we as readers can easily disregard that dangerous clarity, replace it with a more dangerous obscurity that comes and goes in waves. The poem (it’s called a unified poem in the front matter, and certain threads like the frequent appearance of a personality known as “NoOne” do establish a unifying strut work throughout) does set up lines of sight for the reader that are at oblique angles and tease at the notion of complete thoughts. Being the first text I have read of Wuehle’s, there was the inevitable learning process that takes place when learning a poet’s style: the deeper the form and content, the steeper the learning curve.

An ethereal atmosphere of witchcraft (Sycorax from The Tempest is mentioned early), seances, intimations of the circular architecture of Hell, all populate Wuehle’s poem but not in a heavy-handed immature way. These elements just seemed to be the grammar of how this particular mind interprets the world and accounts for the unexplainable. I got the feeling when I was finished reading the book that the surface area of the unexplainable had actually increased, not decreased, but that this increase was not inauspicious or unpleasant; it was like a hidden entry into a plush, unfamiliar chamber echoing with a woman’s voice telling me stories in airy, accented dream-lingo. Accented because it is still English but there is a palpable otherness about the phrases and sentences. Footholds (mindholds?) are not necessarily rare in the book but they are oddly shaped for your body parts to lock into and get purchase.

Definitive statements I can make about the action of the poem: the speaker is an English teacher, is a woman, lives in Iowa, has a peculiar relationship with her mother. But beyond that there is such a wide expanse of stormy fantasy and verbal experimental looseness that you lose a full picture of a speaker. I happen to like the musicianship of curious linguistic constructions like “my sort of spectacular is a sevenfold sequence / artifact of the iris” or “Prim-veined vorlage of my own apron-cosmology” or—

This poem was not written in high-definition. This poem was not written until after all the angels fell and fuzzed the orbs of LED lights. New words. This poem promised to undergo a conversational course in any language you were speaking natively in order to inquire after your country’s crops. This poem knew the smaller it got the tighter the doors it could slip under. This dream stutters. This poem has extra ta-at-tongues. This dream is a fat mute with glue on its eyelashes. This dream is like, bangbang, this poem was like, am I in this paragraph or that one? This poem is sorry in advance for the day you dialed Amherst into GPS and GPS broadcast this poem. This dream has never taken a photograph a funeral only the future:

Poems should not mean but be, we’re admonished, and the being of BOUND is so magical and tonally fascinating that the urge to forge meaning out of what we’re reading passes away with little pain for the going. If you are the type of reader who needs poems to have a carapace of sense, for them to have a minimum of playful dream logic or incantatory rhythm, BOUND will probably not be for you. Reading this book, imagining the sound of the words and having heard Wuehle read from her forthcoming novel Monarch on YouTube, I was put slightly in mind of Laurie Anderson monologues: intelligent, sibylline, feminine utterances delivered over a powerful sound system with video projections on the wall.

BOUND was a good intro, I perceive, for the novel, or at least I am treating it as such. The intro arrived just in time in a fusion of kismet. A phenomenon happens when you’ve never heard of a writer and the split second after you do things just align and there’s a pulse of fame that you’re present to see, photos of their big novel just appear everywhere online the very week that you order it. So discovering Wuehle, and acquiring her poetry book by the skin of my teeth just before this burst of publicity happens carries a rare charge of readerly pleasure.

[nethescurial]

It's hard to know what to make of this [though that's probably more attributable to me having limited experience in poetry], but there's no denying the artistic versatility and depth of this work's composition. "BOUND" is a series of abstract and highly imagistic autobiographical poetry who flits disjointedly-yet-cohesively from themes of childhood, gender and sexuality, and time, stirred together in a sort of Pagan-feeling literary brew. It's written in a structure which is punctuated by evocative minimalistic illustrations that make the work feel as though it's descending in on itself, and it's absolutely syntax-obliterating as well with the amount of odd stylistic flourishes that seem to shift the structure of the book itself. I'd be lying if I said I parsed much of this, but I enjoyed it. Reading it aloud is a joy as well.

"As one by one or all at once the trembling lines
of the universe go up. The stems of the astromeria, of the rose, of the
wisteria twisted to the funereal wreath. The water under-
neath. As one winds the way
of the grieved, as one lives the life of
the grievable.”