Death Industrial Complex

Author: Candice Wuehle

Publisher: Action Books (2020)

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, hazy yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of "cryptobeauty."

"Fashioning her Francesca Woodman from gloves and veils, eels and electricities, Candice Wuehle’s Industrial Death Complex is the most exquisite pen pal, a Pretty Pretty Poltergeist, a portrait that evades as it enchants. “Writing with both hands,” Wuehle’s 'unsuicide note' is a Josephus Thimister gown of a book, rawing its silks, shedding its skins, letting all that sad/badgirl beauty bleed on, bleed out."

–JoAnna Novak