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Death Industrial Complex
Candice Wuehle's DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX is a meditation on the cultural obsession with the bodies of dead women and an occult invocation of the artist Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman's photographs with their long exposures and blurred lenses, this book is haunted and haunting, hazey yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of "cryptobeauty."
- GenresPoetry
85 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2020
2 people are currently reading
183 people want to read
About the author
Candice Wuehle
11 books57 followersCandice 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.
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.
Originally from Iowa City, Iowa, Candice lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her husband Andrew and their rabbit, William the Bunny.
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.
Originally from Iowa City, Iowa, Candice lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her husband Andrew and their rabbit, William the Bunny.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 28, 2021
such a refreshing and creative poetry collection, the best collections are the ones that get you itching to write something of your own, heres some highlights:
"i don't think deterioration exists. vince, does that make it harder to believe in truth? i just don't grieve; i become the wallpaper, i become the bark of the tree and i don't believe in loss."
"Memory is an accomplishment of texture. i felt the tongue to be an act of genius; like a letter from a dead person, it was aged and anachronistic if taken out of its envelope. i felt the tongue inside me, articulation of an antique voice. No one is going to speak for me. vince, no one is going to speak for me. They can say they see what i saw but i'm light burning backwards, the opposite of a dying star. A chant in reverse, articulate in its reverb alone. A tonguing: the speech of feeling."
"The outline of a body is a good debate—an investment in being present or, being absent."
"Like i invented myself and named my nude body Imperative. Like i was unafraid of crevasses, of the clear sticky, of deepness."
"An artist's life is about eating, is about the twisted constellation inside the stomach. Is glowing metabolized. You really are here."
"when i was 13 i started writing with both my hands at once so i could make something that touched itself in the middle. i became an angel. i put space between the letters of my name and my identity was then entirely composed of light. this is why i swallowed a phone and pulled the cord through my throat and mouth."
"look me in the eye and tell me you don't already feel squeezed. the ball python has a heart, too. how hard have you ever thought about what is inside you?"
"All the power in the world can't make a Cathedral anything but a room. i spit in the rain to prove it."
"i don't think deterioration exists. vince, does that make it harder to believe in truth? i just don't grieve; i become the wallpaper, i become the bark of the tree and i don't believe in loss."
"Memory is an accomplishment of texture. i felt the tongue to be an act of genius; like a letter from a dead person, it was aged and anachronistic if taken out of its envelope. i felt the tongue inside me, articulation of an antique voice. No one is going to speak for me. vince, no one is going to speak for me. They can say they see what i saw but i'm light burning backwards, the opposite of a dying star. A chant in reverse, articulate in its reverb alone. A tonguing: the speech of feeling."
"The outline of a body is a good debate—an investment in being present or, being absent."
"Like i invented myself and named my nude body Imperative. Like i was unafraid of crevasses, of the clear sticky, of deepness."
"An artist's life is about eating, is about the twisted constellation inside the stomach. Is glowing metabolized. You really are here."
"when i was 13 i started writing with both my hands at once so i could make something that touched itself in the middle. i became an angel. i put space between the letters of my name and my identity was then entirely composed of light. this is why i swallowed a phone and pulled the cord through my throat and mouth."
"look me in the eye and tell me you don't already feel squeezed. the ball python has a heart, too. how hard have you ever thought about what is inside you?"
"All the power in the world can't make a Cathedral anything but a room. i spit in the rain to prove it."
March 3, 2023
This was certainly an experience! I enjoyed this book, but something about it (the formatting? the themes? the unusually stark white color of the pages?) made me slightly nauseated, which I think is why it took me so long to get through. This poetry collection was published before Wuehle's novel, Monarch, but I appreciated how she delves into a lot of the same themes in both. Warms my heart when writers/artists/filmmakers continuously explore the niche topics that they're interested in through their work!
...i think
we are more afraid of monsters knowing our
language than we are of knowing the language of
the monster. i made the jailers listen. it is 1979
and i killed mary jane shoes, i killed little girl
voices, i killed demurring. i said i am actually all
done with jail: i am now the gate.
...i think
we are more afraid of monsters knowing our
language than we are of knowing the language of
the monster. i made the jailers listen. it is 1979
and i killed mary jane shoes, i killed little girl
voices, i killed demurring. i said i am actually all
done with jail: i am now the gate.
January 12, 2022
Experimental, haunted, flickering little loops of dissolving language and filtered light. Poems that dwell on their obsessions: on bodies, violence, mirrors, anatomy, photography, fashion, death. More than anything it's a meditation on (or attempted séance of) Francesca Woodman, her photography, writings, and short life. But you could easily read these (as I did) with little familiarity of the subject, and it's still a perfect little book.
May 6, 2024
Early in Death Industrial Complex, Wuehle writes, “i’m going to speak slowly / in the language of the mise en abyme, of Spiralism.” This poetry collection is a testimony to the unending—the coil, the endless spindle. Combining threads of the occult with themes of America’s obsession with dead women’s bodies, Wuehle forces us to reconcile our curiosities with uncomfortable verities. All the while, she siphons the language that would allow us to defend ourselves from her close scrutiny. Wuehle provides a warning for the readers: “This is a straight story / told crooked.” Even as we learn more about the speaker and Wuehle’s poetics of trauma and the occult, we must remember that we will never have the whole truth. Here, learning the truth of the matter requires submerging ourselves in liminal spaces, something we glimpse but can never fully enter.
Find my full review at The Rumpus.
Find my full review at The Rumpus.
September 16, 2020
Haunting piece of work that is as much a meditation on the life and work of Francesca Woodman as it is an extension of it. This is a welcome addition to the burgeoning genre that seems to have been stirred awake in the dawn of streaming documentary and widespread exposure to the formally unknown or “cultish” artist. Work inspired by work of another has always existed but it seems the actual channeling and inhabiting of the artist has found a home in this new poetic form with profound results such as this.
October 11, 2022
“i wear a velvet dress so i will always / recognize myself / as soft, so i will have a record / of the crush, so i remember the meaning / of touch.”
she just like me for real. i love this, aesthetically it’s gothic in a way that meditates on the female form and the female consciousness. i love it.
she just like me for real. i love this, aesthetically it’s gothic in a way that meditates on the female form and the female consciousness. i love it.
December 22, 2020
I love this collection and its novel approaches to form, how the text communicates glitctches & the loooooong-exposure photography of Francesca Woodman. A spooky look at beauty, voids, image, & how image is co-opted.
May 10, 2023
Absolute favorite collection of poetry I read it again and again when I need to feel seen
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May 22, 2025im fat as fuck and chill with it so nothing here for me
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews