BOUND

Author: Candice Wuehle

Publisher: Inside the Castle (2018)

“Candice Wuehle’s BOUND is of presence and practice. It is of enactment and performance. It carries with it something that reminds me of how the forest is and how it comes to be. The intimacy of the play between something magnetic and inevitable and something you couldn’t prepare yourself to meet save keeping your porous body trembling. 'NoOne was the only one witnessed me / act out this poem,' says Wuehle’s work, its voice emerging from all angles. This is poetry that is feminine and magic on its own luminous terms, via a shimmering of the literary politic and its unspoken / spoken laws. 'Speak your odd offer or the spell / can’t craft. Lots of this NoOne wants.' Like Lisa Robertson or Selah Saterstrom, Wuehle reminds us that poetry and art don’t ask us for anything, but we could give ourselves to it. When we do, there we are, unfolding in the form, in the word, in the forest. I underline a line that says, 'We’ve all been here a long time.' I find BOUND incredible and filled with a movement I’ll return to, that I’ll continue to watch / change.”

–Carrie Lorig

“In Candice Wuehle’s BOUND, language refuses to be anything but unbound. Resisting the strictures and corsets of settled form and content, and defying easy categorization, her poems cavort with stylish disobedience and élan through a bildungsroman told slant: “An aria also has no center.” Is our inheritance of female literary romanticism (Brontë, Plath, et al.) binding, or bound to set us free as “velveteen schemers”? The figure of “NoOne” haunting the book might be a relief from (gendered) identity or a specter of oblivion—Wuehle keeps her cards close to her vest even while heartbreakingly reminding us that all is performance. Dive into this “fairypoem” as it performs and subverts itself simultaneously.”

–Donna Stonecipher

“Candice Wuehle fuses kinetic occultism (the work starts with a spell, and swirls with ghosts) with a materialism so extreme it becomes strange and nonhuman. 'Notably The Earth’s Original Atmosphere Did Not Contain Oxygen,' she writes early on, and it feels like the sentiment could be applied to this electric collection as well—the spaces of this book are planetary and heretical. 'Even autumn,' the poet writes, 'eats other atmospheres.'”

–James Pate