Lionel Erskine Britton - a drama from 1930. in which a giant Computer is set up in the Sahara to run human affairs according to ambiguously Utopian tenets.

 

Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth, 1930

A Brain is constructed in the Sahara Desert -- presently It grows larger than the Desert ... It controls the whole activities and does all the thinking of the world. Ultimately a star collides with the sun while man is still tied within the limits of the solar system. The Brain describes the approaching process, Its helplessness in comparison with Its former omnipotent power over the world. It deplores mankind's delay in not co-operating earlier, which makes it impossible now to escape the catastrophe. It has visions, premonitions of what might have been.

One Sunday in April 1930, actors in “little shiny pants” performed an extremely strange play in London titled, “Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth.”

A blurb summarizing the plot stated: “A Brain is constructed in the Sahara Desert — presently It grows larger than the Desert — out of pure mechanism, by the whole of the human race, It controls the whole activities and does all the thinking of the world.”

Written by obscure outsider Lionel Erskine Britton, a working-class intruder within London’s literary elite who had first worked in a factory at age 13, the play depicted the construction of an artificial superintelligence, in the form of a synthetic brain “creeping over the world.”

Humans in the play slowly lose all autonomy and come to function — in strict unison — like neurons making up one vast global ganglion. The play revolted most critics.

But Britton, an ardent socialist with Stalinist sympathies, openly celebrated this imagined future. While he was not alone in predicting something like it, others, by contrast, portrayed it as an oncoming catastrophe.

Whether they were cheered or chilled by the prospect, multiple forecasters imagined contemporary developments culminating in some kind of planet-sized brain that would perform executive function at an intercontinental scale, dictating affairs like a global frontal lobe.

This, after all, was not only an era of collectivism and roiling mass movements. It was also the moment when entomologists were first making popular the notion of a “superorganism.” Just as ants cooperate to forge an anthill — generating a whole far more potent than the sum of its parts — it became pertinent to ask whether globalizing humanity might — intentionally or not — be birthing a new form of planetary intelligence, fathoms more sovereign than any individual or national institution.

What follows is the story of how a century ago, forgotten voices foresaw the present dawning age of synthetic intelligence: envisaging futures wherein humans might cede their role as the apex cogitator and become subsumed within budding systems of nonhuman cunning. - Thomas Moynihan

https://www.noemamag.com/are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain/

When I first began studying Lionel Britton, and having some knowledge of his family background, it rapidly became clear to me that his only published novel Hunger and Love (1931) is to a certain extent an attack not just on religion, war, the monarchy, the business world, and the judiciary, but also on his own family who represented most of those institutions. I knew nothing of his half-uncle Reginald Britton, although Lionel must have, and at least part of his venom must have been aimed at him: it would be difficult to imagine a better representative of the Establishment than Rex, as his family call him.

I've named the sub-title of this post 'What Lionel Britton Was Up To' by way of an ironic comment on a chapter in Hunger and Love: 'What Evolution Is Up To'. It would have been ironic to Lionel because he would not have associated his half-uncle's life with evolution - quite the reverse, in fact. To say that Lionel was the black sheep of the family somehow doesn't say enough, but it'll have to do until I think of something better. - Tony Shaw

https://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/2011/01/reginald-ernest-james-britton-what.html

Tony Shaw: Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography

This thesis is the first long study of the forgotten novelist and playwright Lionel Britton, whose creative works were all published in the 1930s. Throughout, the emphasis is on his only published novel, the very long and experimental Hunger and Love (1931). The Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, U. S. A., along with many unpublished materials of Britton's, holds former states of the novel, and I use a large amount of this material in my thesis; I suggest reasons why the content of the typescripts was gradually changed from the 1920s to 1930. Another vital issue is Britton's status as a working-class author, and it is my contention that Hunger and Love is an important working-class novel, although it has been almost totally neglected by the critics recovering this sub-genre. My thesis also addresses modernism in working-class fiction, a subject which has all too often been ignored by the almost automatic foregrounding of realism, and is a strong feature of Hunger and Love. Following this, my thesis broadens out to cover political minorities represented as outsiders in literature, and deals with the unmarried woman, the homosexual and the non-white, comparing them with the working-class protagonist in Hunger and Love. The concluding chapter involves the utopias and dystopias of minority groups, with special reference to Britton's Brain (1930) and Spacetime Inn (1932), which as plays are very unusual to the science fiction genre. Read it here:   [PDF] The Work of Lionel Britton | Semantic Scholar

(1887-1971) UK playwright and author, a conscientious objector during World War One who gained some prominence in the interwar period for his Scientific Romance Hunger and Love, Etc (1931), a speculative proletarian/modernist Dystopia, written before (and influential upon) but published after Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (performed 1930; 1930), a drama in which a giant Computer is set up in the Sahara to run human affairs according to ambiguously Utopian tenets. This it does until nearly the End of the World, when a wandering star collides with the planet.

Spacetime Inn (performed 1931; 1932), also a play, expounds a vision of things derived in part from the theories of J W Dunne, though the main dramatic interest lies in the interactions of various Icon figures – Eve (see Adam and Eve), Doctor Samuel Johnson, Napoleon, the Queen of Sheba, Queen Victoria, Karl Marx, William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw – as they deal with two uncomprehending Cockney intruders into the "Eternal Inn" that has become their world. Ultimately it is indicated that, echoing Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (13 July 1890 San Francisco Examiner), the entire action has taken place during suspended Time in the last moments before a road-crash Disaster. A UK theatre licence having been refused because of the inclusion of Queen Victoria, Spacetime Inn has the unusual distinction of being the only play ever performed – or rather read, with Britton himself playing all the parts – in the House of Commons, on 10 June 1931, to a steadily dwindling audience.

Animal Ideas: A Dramatic Symphony of the Human in the Universe (1935), though less cogent as a drama and never performed, engages in similarly ambitious metaphysics. [JC/DRL]

https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/britton_lionel

Catherine Axelrad - With a mix of mischief, naivety, pragmatism and curiosity, Célina’s account of her relationship with the ageing writer, Victor Hugo, is an arresting depiction of enduring matters of sexual consent and class relations.

 

Catherine Axelrad, Célina, Trans. by

Philip Terry, Coles Books, 2024

By the age of fifteen, Célina has lost her father to the sea, a brother to suicide, a sister to tuberculosis, her virginity to a wolfish man at the inn where she was waitressing, and the job at the inn when another servant informed on her. In the Channel Islands of the 1850s, Alderney is not yet the tourist paradise filled with luxury cars it is today. When the chance arises to leave and work in Hauteville House for the Victor Hugo household during their exile in Guernsey, it is Célina's first glimpse of a different kind of life. Axelrad sheds a new light on the complexity of Hugo’s persona, and on the sexual and class dynamics at play in the proprietary, yet strangely tender relationship between the maid and le grand homme.

In Philip Terry’s agile translation, which imaginatively draws on the School of New York Poets, Célina’s mischievous spirit is matched by her vivid language. A fictional recreation based on Hugo’s Guernsey Diaries and on letters from his wife, Célina is a miniature literary monument to a forgotten life cut short.

Drawing on Victor Hugo’s cryptic diary entries and letters from his wife, Catherine Axelrad’s Célina builds a snapshot of a teenage chambermaid in the Hugo household during the author’s exile in Guernsey, who was apparently prey to the great man’s gargantuan sexual appetites. With a mix of mischief, naivety, pragmatism and curiosity, Célina’s account of her relationship with the ageing writer is an arresting depiction of enduring matters of sexual consent and class relations. 

‘Pitch-perfect, and so light yet so profound. All of Axelrad's books have at their centre a silent, vulnerable young woman, but also one who is tough and resilient, totally unsentimental but deeply responsive and actually very intelligent. How such a person emerges out of such apparent silence is the wonder of her work. Célina is as quiet and devastating a novel as I have read in a long time. Unforgettable.’ — Gabriel Josipovici, author of 100 Days

‘Seen through Célina’s eyes, told with her curiosity, her wonder, her sharp observations, what we witness unfolding here is not so much Victor Hugo’s life as that of the young narrator. We see the intelligence she brings to bear, playing her few cards just so in a time which may be the most patriarchal in our history: the nineteenth century. Catherine Axelrad describes a quiet young woman who nevertheless hears everything, sees everything, silently appraises her lovers, picks and chooses, and escapes submission in her own way. It’s a joyful read.’ — Colombe Schneck, author of The Paris Trilogy

'Living in exile in the Channel Islands, the irrepressibly philandering author of Les Misérables went through what is called his “Chambermaid Period”. In this moving short novel, Catherine Axelrad gives us the great man and his retinue, his house and his mania for Gothic décor, the island and the threatening sea, all through the eyes of a chambermaid—not a fantasy maid, but the real girl from Alderney whose death in 1861 saddened the whole Hugolian establishment. The poverty, ill-health and exploitation of working folk and especially of the young girls who are brought to life here deepen the understanding of what Hugo’s great novel was really about. In this lively translation by Philip Terry, Axelrad’s portrait of a normal yet unique Victorian household seen from “downstairs” is a true gem.' — David Bellos, author of The Novel of the Century. The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables

“In this remarkable book Catherine Axelrad gives speech to a young woman born in poverty and almost lost to history. Célina is restored to life, emerging as lively, courageous, complex, witty, pragmatic, and joyful. There are moments of great tenderness and longing; despite her exploitation (for relations are often complicated, as Axelrad so subtly weaves), there is a real and delicate relation between her and her master, with whom she discovers the possibility of poetic language. Célina and Célina, woman and book, haunt me.” — Sharon Kivland, author of Reading Nana: An Experimental Novel

'The extraordinary quality of Axelrad’s writing is the silence that envelops it. There is a featherweight lightness to it all that is a supreme contrast to the heavy mournfulness one feels after reaching the final page. Célina is not a submissive character, and life’s blows, including fears of impending death, glance off her, seemingly without leavinga mark. Nor is she subversive (unlike Célestine in Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, whose employer fetishises her boots and ends up dead with one of the boots stuffed in his mouth). She knows that her social standing limits her freedom and the options open to her, and that it’s not, as one character says, ‘a crime to sleep with a servant’. Nevertheless, within those limitations, she is able to exert her individuality and choose her own lovers, including one disastrous final relationship after she leaves Guernsey. At the end, I could almost believe that Axelrad’s Célina could have had some influence on Hugo’s creative life, perhaps as a prototype of Fantine, one of the most attractive characters in Les Misérables, forced to become a prostitute before she, too, dies from tuberculosis.' -- Mark Bostridge, Spectator

‘Catherine Axelrad's exquisite novella Célina, first published in 1997 (now in a transporting English translation by Philip Terry) is a plain, matter-of-fact and consequently very moving diary of a chambermaid. It carries no salaciousness, but stands for itself […] Axelrad's dispassionate depiction of sullied innocence and forced compromise is brutal and devastating.’ — Catherine Taylor, Irish Times

‘A tender, melancholic tale where Catherine Axelrad has managed to avoid all pitfalls. Neither the story of the poor servant; nor that of the great discontent; nor that of the lascivious old man handing out two francs – scrupulously accounted for in his notebook – in return for special favours. No – only the true and touching voice of young Célina Henry, perfectly captured and wondrously restored, which the fine phrases overheard at Hauteville House have, if nothing else, helped liberate from those last sorry days.’ – Mona Ozouf, L’Obs

‘A Victor Hugo whom we do not know, for never had he been presented against this backdrop, nor indeed as part of the banal unfolding of daily life. A discovery, in fact, especially because he is not the book’s main character. This is well and truly the story of Célina Henry, the maid, who discovers – and thereby enables us to discover – a man ultimately like so many others, with his ordinary share of qualities and flaws.’ — Clément Borgal, La République du Centre

 Recently I visited Hauteville House, Victor Hugo’s home on Guernsey, now magnificently restored, where he spent 15 years of exile in opposition to the autocratic regime of Napoleon III. His third-floor eyrie, a crystal cage with walls and ceilings of plate glass, resembles a greenhouse. Hugo wrote there, standing at a small, flat-topped desk, gazing out across the water at the distant coastline of France. He slept in one of two adjacent attic rooms. In the other slept a chambermaid, summoned by her master with a few light taps on the partition wall.

The publication in the 1950s of coded entries in Hugo’s account books revealed payments for sex to a succession of serving maids. One of these was Célina Henry, the narrator of Catherine Axelrad’s novella. Published in France in 1997, the book has been translated into English by Philip Terry with some nice demotic touches.

Axelrad takes the bare facts about Célina – born into poverty on Alderney, joining the Hugo household in the late 1850s, and dying from tuberculosis in 1861 – and weaves them into a story of a vulnerable but resilient young woman who accepts the two francs left under her pillow for a night of sexual favours while eavesdropping during the day on the life taking place above stairs. Célina’s curiosity and intelligence provide her with insights about Hugo’s marriage and his relationship with the mistress he keeps down the street. She adopts the tragedy of Hugo’s family life, the drowning of his elder daughter in the Seine years earlier, as if it were her own. She grows jealous for her intimacy with Hugo when he briefly turns his attention to the local seamstress.

The extraordinary quality of Axelrad’s writing is the silence that envelops it. There is a featherweight lightness to it all that is a supreme contrast to the heavy mournfulness one feels after reaching the final page. Célina is not a submissive character, and life’s blows, including fears of impending death, glance off her, seemingly without leavinga mark. Nor is she subversive (unlike Célestine in Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, whose employer fetishises her boots and ends up dead with one of the boots stuffed in his mouth). She knows that her social standing limits her freedom and the options open to her, and that it’s not, as one character says, ‘a crime to sleep with a servant’. Nevertheless, within those limitations, she is able to exert her individuality and choose her own lovers, including one disastrous final relationship after she leaves Guernsey.

At the end, I could almost believe that Axelrad’s Célina could have had some influence on Hugo’s creative life, perhaps as a prototype of Fantine, one of the most attractive characters in Les Misérables, forced to become a prostitute before she, too, dies from tuberculosis. - Mark Bostridge

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/another-mistress-for-victor-hugo-celina-by-catherine-axelrad-reviewed/

excerpt:

I ARRIVED AT SAINT PETER PORT on the second of May 1858, but I didn’t dare present myself at Hauteville House, as it was already ten minutes after nine when the packet-boat docked. As it was still light I thought I would at least locate the house before finding a bed at the inn, so I could get there sooner the next day and show them I wasn’t afraid of an early start. Round the harbour there were almost as many people as at Granville, but many too who seemed to have nowhere to live, and even some old vagrants who waited for the boats to beg from the passengers. The woman who pointed the way for me was so thin that her legs barely supported her; and when I told her I had nothing to give her she threatened me with a raised fist yelling at me incomprehensibly, and I was afraid she’d put a curse on me. I left at a run, but I didn’t get very far because the street which leads to the upper town is very hard to climb. Today I know this street and this house so well that when I remember how disorientated I felt on arriving, how strange everything seemed and how I lost my footing on the wet cobblestones, I feel it can hardly be the same place as where I’ve lived since.

After passing several houses I found myself in front of a door marked with the letter H. It was the most impressive building in the street, with beautifully painted iron railings and six steps leading to the doorway, but the curtains were already drawn, and I thought it best not to hang around in front of the door, in case someone came out and caught me loitering. Night was beginning to fall and I was hurrying on back, when a little lower down the street, on my left, I noticed a man coming out of a small house which I’d passed on the way up. The door stood half-open for a little while as someone said their goodbyes to him: a large respectably dressed woman who waved her hand out of the door as she blew him kisses and who spoke in a voice as low as a man’s. I heard her quite clearly as she said: ‘Until tomorrow, dearly beloved, have a pleasant night and think of me in your dreams.’ The man waved his hand in turn saying something which I couldn’t make out, and when the door closed behind him he hurriedly made his way up the street.

I don’t know what devil took hold of me. Perhaps it was just that I used to love laughing so much, and that I hadn’t had anything to laugh about for a long time.”

What I’d heard had made me want to burst out laughing, and when the man came level with me he looked at me with surprise. ‘And what are you laughing at, young lady?’ he asked with a frown. He was small and quite fat and what I could see of his face looked rather ugly. I don’t know what devil took hold of me. Perhaps it was just that I used to love laughing so much, and that I hadn’t had anything to laugh about for a long time. I held up my skirts and curtsied, bowing towards him and, in the voice of monsieur le Curé when he speaks from the pulpit on Sundays, I repeated what the large woman had said to him: ‘Until tomorrow, dearly beloved, have a pleasant night and think of me in your dreams.’ Then before he had time to utter a word, I ran off. I hurtled all the way down the road holding my skirts up before I finally dared to stop and laugh out loud, and this prank amused me so much that I laughed again at the thought of it an hour later before going to sleep.

…

Later that morning Rosalie took me on a tour of the downstairs, and I could see what she meant when she talked about a building site. It was almost impossible to move in the anteroom, and in the tapestry room the chairs weren’t even stitched together. ‘All the same, things are moving forward a lot quicker now that

Monsieur has given Mauger and his bunch of layabouts a talking to,’ said Rosalie. ‘They say that everything will be finished in a couple of days, but I’ll believe it when I see it.’ There was as much panelling as in the cathedral at Granville, all over the walls and right up to the ceiling, all carved and blackened. I couldn’t keep myself from touching it, which made Rosalie laugh; she said if I liked rubbing walls, I’d have plenty to keep me happy, for it was going to be my job to wax them. ‘But where on earth do they find it all?’ I asked. Rosalie said the wood came from old chests that Monsieur bought from farms all over the island. ‘There are at least eight in these two rooms alone,’ she added, ‘if it isn’t a crying shame to break up good furniture that’s still fit for use.’

‘So this is the importance you attach to my work!’ said a voice which made the both of us jump. It was Monsieur, who had been standing in the hall and who had overheard Rosalie’s last words. She didn’t let him fluster her though, and answered him without batting an eyelid: ‘Monsieur knows very well what I think of this work, it’s not the first time I’ve said it.’

‘And certainly not the last!’ said Monsieur stepping into the room where we were standing. He was smiling with an amused look on his face, and didn’t seem at all bothered, but as soon as I caught sight of him I thought there was nothing for it but to take the first boat back to Aurigny, for I recognised the man I’d made fun of yesterday in the street. My face went bright red, and I didn’t dare look up. At first he said nothing to me and continued talking to Rosalie.

‘Now that you have someone to help you, I hope that you’ll be as agreeable as your cooking,’ he said. ‘And what does your assistant call herself?’

He turned towards me waiting for me to reply, but I felt so ashamed that I couldn’t bring myself to speak, and it was Rosalie who said to him: ‘This is Célina Henry, Monsieur. She arrived from Aurigny this morning.’

‘This morning, indeed?’ he asked, with exaggerated surprise, from which it was clear that he had recognised me very well. I summoned all the courage I could muster and lifted my head up: ‘To tell the truth, Monsieur, I arrived yesterday evening, but it was too late to present myself.’ I looked at him wondering what he would say, but he just nodded his head saying that he hadn’t thought that any boats had come in this morning, and he gave me a one franc piece to encourage me to work well

Catherine Axelrad lives and works in Paris. She started writing in the late 80s while working as a teacher. Apart from Célina, her published works include three autofiction novels (including The Warszawianka, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch), a short biography of Molière, a pastiche of Proust (Albertine travestie), and a series of three YA novellas under the pseudonym Alice Chambard. In 2011 she left teaching to study Protestant theology, and in 2014 she became a minister of the Église protestante unie de France. Célina, translated by Philip Terry, is published in paperback original by Les Fugitives.

Maja Haderlap deals with harrowing subjects - murder, torture, persecution and discrimination of an ethnic minority - in intricate and lyrical prose

Maja Haderlap, Angel of Oblivion, Trans. by Tess Lewis, Archipelago, 2016


Haderlap is an accomplished poet, and that lyricism leaves clear traces on this ravishing debut, which won the prestigious Bachmann Prize in 2011. The descriptions are sensual, and the unusual similes and metaphors occasionally change perspective unexpectedly. Angel of Oblivion deals with harrowing subjects - murder, torture, persecution and discrimination of an ethnic minority - in intricate and lyrical prose.


The novel tells the story of a family from the Slovenian minority in Austria. The first-person narrator starts off with her childhood memories of rural life, in a community anchored in the past. Yet behind this rural idyll, an unresolved conflict is smouldering. At first, the child wonders about the border to Yugoslavia, which runs not far away from her home. Then gradually the stories that the adults tell at every opportunity start to make sense. All the locals are scarred by the war. Her grandfather, we find out, was a partisan fighting the Nazis from forest hideouts. Her grandmother was arrested and survived Ravensbrück.

As the narrator grows older, she finds out more. Through conversations at family gatherings and long nights talking to her grandmother, she learns that her father was arrested by the Austrian police and tortured - at the age of ten - to extract information on the whereabouts of his father. Her grandmother lost her foster-daughter and many friends and relatives in Ravensbrück and only escaped the gas chamber by hiding inside the camp itself. The narrator begins to notice the frequent suicides and violent deaths in her home region, and she develops an eye for how the Slovenians are treated by the majority of German-speaking Austrians. As an adult, the narrator becomes politicised and openly criticises the way in which Austria deals with the war and its own Nazi past. In the closing section, she visits Ravensbrück and finds it strangely lifeless - realising that her personal memories of her grandmother are stronger.

Illuminating an almost forgotten chapter of European history and the European present, the book deals with family dynamics scarred by war and torture - a dominant grandmother, a long-suffering mother, a violent father who loves his children but is impossible to live with. And interwoven with this is compelling reflection on storytelling: the narrator hoping to rid herself of the emotional burden of her past and to tell stories on behalf of those who cannot.



2017 PEN America Translation Prize winner"Searingly lyrical...Haderlap's is a significant achievement, hopefully a herald of more to come. An arresting evocation of memory, community, and suffering." — Kirkus Reviews


"Haderlap plunges readers into a morass of European history..." — Publishers Weekly
 
"is inflected with a staccato rhythm—a rush of present-tense observation—that reveals the writer to be a poet at heart... Haderlap's first-person story is authored with the intense sensorial recollections of a child. The book's relevance is its articulation of the long-lasting burden of cultural and semantic chasms that—even generations later—are far from resolved." — Jessica Morgan, Artforum

"Along with everything else she accomplishes with this powerful work — a work of historical witness, a Sebaldian descent into the depths of memory, and a brave and innovative hybrid of fiction and memoir — Haderlap (and her English translator) deserve praise for breaking the silence to bring the stories of Slovenian-speaking Austrians to a much broader audience." — Brendan Driscoll, in The Millions

"[Angel of Oblivion] captures nuances of fleeting emotion thanks to Haderlap’s long-exercised lyric talent while also furnishing as riveting and lucid an account of the Austrian Slovenes in their suffering during and after World War II as will be found in any history book." — Vincent Kling, Translation Review

"A sparkling and hugely sympathetic English translation.... Maja Haderlap is a dramaturge and a poet and her prose is full of rich poetic images and constructions. It is a profoundly beautiful and deeply upsetting novel worthy of all the prizes." — European Literature Network

"Angel of Oblivion is a beautifully poetic novel about a young girl navigating the treacherous terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian as a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliations suffered, and German, a way out of her stifling rural upbringing but also the language of the camps, which her Grandmother barely survived and many family members didn’t." — Festival Neue Literatur

"[A] painstaking and emotional account of the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria during and after World War II." — Abby Sheaffer, ChicagoNow

"Haderlap’s novel seems to transcend the boundaries between languages and histories." — Iga Nowicz, The Glossa

"Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told." — Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

"Haderlap’s novel brings to mind the work of artist Anselm Kiefer ... His paintings evoke the same desolate feeling of a landscape, natural and mental, poisoned by the Holocaust. Though Kiefer’s art is influenced by foreign myths and symbols, there is that same idea that Maja Haderlap confronts in Angel of Oblivion: that even the generation born after the fall of the Third Reich is affected by its legacy." — Devan Brettkelly, ZYZZYVA
"Haderlap delivers a powerful and affecting story about memory, identity and wartime persecution and retaliation. Inspired by the experiences of Haderlap’s family and other Carinthian Slovenes (the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria), Angel of Oblivion offers a compelling character study and shines a necessary light on a small enclave and less-well known chapter of 20th-century European history...Tess Lewis has done a fine job of translating Haderlap’s lucid and lyrical prose." — The National (UAE)

"Angel of Oblivion is a continuous, plunging attempt to express the disorderly but urgent moment of daring to master the unmasterable. There is nothing so crass here as an ‘arc’ or a redemptive release. The reader is on the hook until the end – at which point the narrative’s underlying premises shimmer.” — Ron Slate, On the Seawall (blog)

"Impressive and moving" - Die Zeit

"A heart-wrenching story" - Peter Handke

"Haderlap writes in a clear yet poetic tone, in which time is a 'serene glacier' that crushes everything, all that the young protagonist at first finds wonderful and unchangeable, in its path." - Der Spiegel

"The strength of Haderlap's novel is that it stretches far back in time, in order to make the present recognisable." - Paul Jandl

"By telling her grandmother's story, the narrator finds her own, unmistakeable language, which speaks against the general urge to forget." - Deutschlandradio




It begins with vivid, if randomly recalled, memories of a childhood spent in the Carinthian countryside, near Austria’s border with the former Yugoslavia. Most importantly of all, though, Austrian poet Maja Haderlap opens her debut novel with the solid word referring to the defining presence in her life: “Grandmother.” This determined, ruined old woman emerges as an almost symbolic force. “Grandmother signals with her hand, she wants me to follow.” And follow is precisely what Haderlap’s narrator does. The only way she will ever begin to understand the history of her family, and also that of her culture, is by heeding Grandmother’s words, not merely her advice, but also her stories, dominated as they are by wartime experiences in Ravensbrück, the infamous concentration camp in northern Germany.

One of the earliest statements the narrator offers, if in an ironic context, shapes the entire book: “I, on the other hand, believe every word Grandmother says.” The reader will too, as the old woman bears the burden of survival. She is also the leader of the household and has little faith in her daughter-in-law, the narrator’s mother. The feelings are mutual.

Initially, it seems, much of the domestic tension may be the clash between Grandmother and the little girl’s hapless mother, a woman given to weeping who also possesses a liking for poetry. While Grandmother rules the house, investing everything she cooks with the pervasive scent of her dark, smoky kitchen, the daughter-in-law appears to know her place, which is working outside, doing the milking and tending animals. “She usually comes up to the kitchen window to look for me . . . and calls out . . . sometimes she just leaves without a word.” But there are other, far sadder reasons for the mother’s unhappiness.

These homely scenes detailing the daily chores are gentle and quite beautiful, with faint echoes of a Heaney poem. It is clear that the narrator’s religious-fanatic mother, a good worker, is faulted for not being from farming stock, so the narrator learns her lore from Grandmother. The old lady doesn’t spend much time praying, although she does attend Mass every year to give thanks for the end of the Nazi era, and come All Souls’ Day she places a loaf of bread and a pitcher of milk on the table for the dead. Her reasoning is more practical than spiritual: “So they’ll have something to eat when they come at night and will leave us in peace.”

Present day

It all seems to belong to a far distant time. But then mention is made of the poor reception the family receives of Slovenian television, and suddenly the story moves much closer to the present day. “The men walk around the perimeter of the house holding the antenna which looks like a bare Christmas tree, and we call out the window, ‘now!, now!’ . But the picture is no clearer. “We have no choice but to make do with the shadow television and to feel like pirates in the fog.”

The childhood being described belongs to the 1960s and 1970s. Maja Haderlap was born in August 1961 and grew up speaking two languages: Slovenian and compulsory German.

Angel of Oblivion, although presented as a novel, reads far more as an intelligent, heartfelt memoir recounted by a witness intent on finally telling an unknown story. The narrative is both personal and historic; thoughtful and hasty. The prose is uneven as the language, which is initially plain and factual, becomes increasingly lyrical, almost as if it is charting the narrator’s evolution as a writer. At times, it has a declamatory urgency. Elsewhere there are memorable anecdotes, such as the death of a beloved cow whose calf had been drowned at birth when the cow fell into a river. She is rescued only to subsequently die and be mourned.

There is a persistent sense of a struggle between the deliberate poise of a writer and the desperate human need to convey the communal pain felt by all, if the individual responses to it were varied. It is a fascinating book but the problems in the writing and use of the continuous present tense are less to do with the translation – although “The stallion’s perspiration” does jar – than with the original editing; the narrative reads as if written in a rush, which is at odds with its deliberate intent.

The material does outweigh the stylistic misgivings yet also compounds the feeling that it reads as a memoir, not a novel. If Haderlap appears overwhelmed by her story it is not surprising, as most readers will share this sensation.

Shadows run through the book. There is the shadow of history itself and that the narrator’s family as part of the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria are also shadows. While Austria, which was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, fell into a victim role, the plight of its Slovenian-speaking population was to be forgotten or, at best, grouped in with the Yugoslav partisans. Initially a backdrop, the politics seeping through the pages becomes central to the shaping of the individual lives.

No matter how much her mother tries to become involved with the narrator in little ways, even hanging saccharine images of guardian angels over the child’s bed, Grandmother is ever present. She certainly dominates, and her experience in Ravensbrück, where most of the prisoners were women, is the heart of the book, particularly as she appears to make telling reference to her time there, almost in passing: “Early in 1945, more and more transports arrived in Ravensbrück. There was no more room in the barracks, the women had to sleep three or four to a bunk. Many women from Poland and Slovenia arrived, many city women from France, Belgium, Holland, good Lord, how those women fought for their dresses and furs, Grandmother says.”

Kindly influence

The narrator’s emotional mother inhabits a vague hell all her own. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, which she once claimed that the Virgin Mary had warned her against, she appears a more kindly influence than she is granted as it was her who wanted the narrator to receive a good education. The mother eventually turns to writing poetry and seems intent on salvaging her life.

But if Grandmother is a towering figure, the mangled existence of her son, the narrator’s father, also features as an ongoing family disaster. He is frequently drunk, often unbalanced and reeling from the various traumas he has undergone since being hung from a tree as a 12-year-old boy by Austrian police quizzing him about the whereabouts of his father. His threats of suicide punctuate the narrator’s childhood. He survives, for the narrator, as an adult and published poet, to haul him from taverns. Still, his chaotic misery does convince as wholly dreadful, utterly human.

Autobiographical novel or memoir or messy hybrid, Angel of Oblivion has so much information, as well as images which will linger, that its actual genre is almost irrelevant. When the narrator’s attention moves more to herself, it is less interesting. But she does mention standing on Republic Square in Ljubljana on June 26th, 1991, when the new Slovenian flag was raised for the first time.

German non-fiction writer Eugen Ruge turned his family’s history into a disciplined and convincing debut novel In Times of Fading Light (2011, translated by Anthea Bell, 2013). His methodology is more coherent than Haderlap’s; his voice more restrained. Yet stylistic misgivings aside, Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told.

Grandmother told the narrator not to make any noise. “Not so loud, she says, or you can’t hear anything.” Haderlap heeded her, heard a great deal and has shared it. - Eileen Battersby

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/angel-of-oblivion-by-maja-haderlap-a-childhood-haunted-by-history-1.2754520

I came to Angel of Oblivion without any understanding of the larger context surrounding the story. The phrase “Carinthian Slovenes” was meaningless to me, and I resisted the urge to resort to Google. Instead, I immersed myself in Maja Haderlap’s novel and paid close attention to the details, exactly the kind of reading this novel rewards.
The first-person narrative is told from the perspective of an unnamed girl, a girl who appears to be a close reflection of young Haderlap herself. Grandmother, Father, and Mother—relationships rather than names are emphasized here—play key supporting roles. Gradually, by slipping in details throughout the early chapters, Haderlap situates her story in the far south of Austria in the Province of Carinthia, bordering Italy and Yugoslavia (now present-day Slovenia). The girl and her family belong to the Slovene-speaking ethnic minority in the province. Since the founding of the First Austrian Republic in 1919, the Carinthian Slovenes have suffered prejudice and discrimination, and they were one of the non-Jewish groups sent to Nazi concentration camps during WWII.
Angel of Oblivion is part history lesson, part memoir, and part coming of age novel. As Haderlap mentioned in an interview a few years ago, this is “the forgotten story of the Slovene minority of Carinthia.” For most American readers, this book will fill a regrettable gap in their WWII knowledge. Far from a dry recitation of facts, though, Haderlap tells this history through the personal stories of her characters, many of which are based on real life events and family members.
The narrator is born into a community she describes as “confined by politics to history’s cellar, where they are besieged and poisoned by their own memories.” Indeed, almost all of the novel’s action takes place in the past, forming the basis of stories and memories. Grandmother survived a concentration camp, and Father joined the partisans, a resistance group that fought the Nazis on both sides of the Carinthia-Yugoslavia border. The most harrowing episodes in the novel involve these past experiences, and the girl’s childhood is spent steeped in her relatives’ recollections.
So pervasive is the past in this story that it takes on the force of an active character. The past menaces and knocks on doors and is dragged behind the girl “like a rickety wooden horse on wheels.” This is a past with violent intentions:
As I listen [to family stories], something collapses in my chest, as if a stack of logs were rolling away behind me, into the time before my time, and that time reaches out to grab me and I start to give in out of fascination and fear. It’s got hold of me, I think, now it’s here with me.
This sounds like something out of a horror story: A young girl pitted against a dark and evil force, her very survival hanging in the balance. This struggle and its outcome for the girl—i.e. Haderlap herself—is the focal point of the novel, which manages to be both exciting and suspenseful even though nothing much actually happens. The past fights against the future, the Slovenian language against the German, the traditional farming life against a more modern and educated city existence. I will not reveal the outcome of this epic battle here except to say that the language in which Haderlap chose to write her story is a good clue.
I cannot end this piece without also mentioning Haderlap’s lyrical prose and Tess Lewis’s gorgeous translation. Haderlap has written three books of poetry, and that gift for language helps to brighten and elevate this novel’s grim reality. This is a community decimated by the Nazi concentration camps and haunted by memories. Yet it is also a world where the girl and her mother “sit for hours in meadows of language and speak in the rhythm of rhymes” and where “the summer days have a glittering golden border and more of the color rubs off onto [the girl’s] skin every day.” Lewis’s translation preserves the poetry and honors the cadence of Haderlap’s prose.
If you need any more reasons to read this book, consider that it already won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachman Prize in Germany as well as the Prix du Premier Roman in France. For her translation, Tess Lewis won the Austrian Cultural Forum’s translation prize and the PEN Translation Prize. Add to that its place on this year’s long list for the Best Translated Book Award, and it is difficult to find another book as worthy of your close attention as Angel of Oblivion. - Gwen Dawson
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=19142

Candice Wuehle - a humorous novel based on a popular '90s-era conspiracy theory, about a former child beauty queen who falls in love with a fellow pageant girl and, with the help of her riot grrrl babysitter, decides to take down the organization that secretly programmed her as an assassin

Candice Wuehle, Monarch, Soft Skull, 2022

Candice Wuehle's MONARCH, a humorous novel based on a popular '90s-era conspiracy theory, about a former child beauty queen who falls in love with a fellow pageant girl and, with the help of her riot grrrl babysitter, decides to take down the organization that secretly programmed her as an assassin, to Sarah Lyn Rogers at Soft Skull.

After waking up with a strange taste in her mouth and mysterious bruises, former child pageant star Jessica Clink unwittingly begins an investigation into a nefarious deep state underworld. Equipped with the eccentric education of her father, Dr. Clink (a professor of Boredom Studies and the founder of an elite study group known as the Devil’s Workshop), Jessica uncovers a disquieting connection between her former life as a beauty queen and an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH.

As Jessica moves closer to the truth, she begins to suspect the involvement of everyone around her, including her own mother, Grethe (a Norwegian pageant queen turned occult American wellness guru for suburban housewives). With the help of Christine (her black-lipsticked riot grrrl babysitter and confidante), Jessica sets out to take down Project MONARCH. More importantly, she must discover if her first love, fellow teen queen Veronica Marshall, was genuine or yet another deep state plant.

Merging iconic true crime stories of the ’90s (Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey) with theories of human consciousness, folklore, and a perennial cultural fixation with dead girls, MONARCH questions the shadow sides of self-concept: Who are you if you don’t know yourself?

"If the vacant, robotic gaze of the beauty queen has ever seemed sinister to you, Ms. Wuehle provides a possible reason... Wuehle pursues her gonzo premise with satirical gusto, mixing together some curious brew of Robert Ludlum and Don DeLillo.. [A] lively debut." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Intoxicating and strange . . . A novel that's as addicting as it is heartbreaking." —Sophia June, NYLON, One of the Must-Read Books of the Month

"Candice Wuehle had me at 'Jon Benet Ramsey.' The poet's new novel follows a former child pageant star as she discovers ties to her previous glory and a deep state government program. Add an occult wellness guru to the mix, a heaping of mommy issues, and a queer romance for taste and this might just be my ideal book." —Kerensa Cadenas, Thrillist

"Bizarre delight of a debut novel . . . A natural page-turner." —Lily DeTaeye, Little Village

"Wuehle’s net of insights, jokes, linguistic will-o’-the-wisps push the definition of surreal . . . Wuehle is a poet writing a thriller, and the cerebral, beautiful poetry intoxicates the story . . . A maze of lyrically breathtaking imagery and storytelling that rivals the stepping-stone pathways across the dream-river in the films of Charlie Kaufman (see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synechdoche, New York, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, etc) . . . ‘90s pop culture, espionage, occultism are all bonded in an amalgam of feminist folklore for the 21st century." —Jesse Hilson, Pink Plastic House

"Monarch is a novel of ideas welded to the structure of a page-turner . . . Darkly comic, cynical, thought-provoking, and strange, Wuehle’s novel is a rare offering." —Mara Krause, ZYZZYVA

"Wuehle is catching a wave of nineties nostalgia and retrospective media criticism, in large part ushered in by the immensely popular podcast, 'You’re Wrong About' . . . As much as MONARCH is a conspiracy-theory-thriller, inviting the possibility that an amorphous, terrible something in one’s environment might be located and made legible, it is also a story about piecing together the fuzzy impressions of childhood, watching as they form into a coherent whole the way a photo develops in a darkroom. Wuehle is masterful . . . An artisan; one senses while reading her that she has absolute control over the page—could conjure any emotion or image with startling concision, no matter how surreal or uncanny." —Lily Houston Smith, Chicago Review of Books

"A sinisterly fun novel . . . For fans of Stranger Things mixed with Little Miss Sunshine. It doesn’t sound like it works, but it sure as hell does." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

"What does it mean when you’re not who you thought you were? Alternately: the categories of 'beauty queen' and 'sleeper agent' have, historically speaking, not had much overlap. Candace Wuehle’s forthcoming Monarch poses the question: what if someone could lay claim to both of those job descriptions? Throw in a touch of the occult and a bit of punk rock and you have an intriguing combination." —Tobias Carroll, Tor.com

"Fantastically strange . . . Monarch feels a bit like the folks behind You’re Wrong About teamed up with the writers of Killing Eve, and they all did some psychedelics and wrote a script together." —Molly Odintz, CrimeReads, A Most Anticipated Book

"A deeply introspective novel with a notable metaphor for reinvention after trauma in the form of a weaponized pageant girl." —Kirkus Reviews

"Readers sturdy enough to peer into this glittering, multifaceted novel will find weaponized beauty reflected back." —Publishers Weekly

“A wise, unsettling, and multifaceted masterpiece, MONARCH succeeds on all levels—as a portrait of an endearingly dysfunctional family, as a shadow history of Y2K and the hidden power structure underlying and undermining contemporary life, and as a profound exploration of the extremely dicey prospect of being a self in a body in the world. Unless you’re hiding in an underground city or frozen in a kryokammer in the desert, you'll want to run out and get this one right away!” —David Leo Rice, author of The Dodge City Trilogy, Angel House, and Drifter: Stories

“In this riddled pageantric, insomniac, photographic, and university-infused world of eating disorders, triple suicides, astral projections, enigmatic bruises, and uncontrollable impulses, Candice Wuehle’s poetic and narrative gaze on everything she Midas-touches is eyelined, eyeshadowed, polished, Norwegian lip-penciled, and loose powdered with her devilishly inventive, singularly imaginative beauty and a devastating wry sense of humor. Her brilliance in MONARCH will lacquer, enamel, and wax you and turn your mind inside out like a monarch butterfly macerated in emulsion.” —Vi Khi Nao, author of The Vegas Dilemma and Swimming with Dead Stars

"Don DeLillo can only dream of being Candice Wuehle, who's wrenched the maximalist postmodern novel from the hands of old white men and given it an enticingly feminist spin. MONARCH is a smart, weird, funny gut punch, the kind of book that will blister your brain in the best possible way." —Rafael Frumkin, author of The Comedown

This book is really quite sinister, and I mean that in the Latin sense--MONARCH takes the left-hand path through a chilling (and, if you're honest with yourself, quite real) landscape as Jessica, a decommissioned MK Ultra-esque beauty queen traces back to her origins as such. Along the way, she has to tell the true from the false, which can be difficult when you have a closet full of alters and a lot of gruesome off-label memories.

Underneath it all is a question you can probably relate to even if you aren't the progeny of a cryogenically preserved mother and a father who lectures on Boredom Studies: How do we know which of our reactions belong to us? How can we tell apart the conditioned self from the one we actually live with, especially when we've been trauma-trained into not looking too closely at certain facts? What happens when our frozen selves start to thaw?

If you've always been suspicious of the institutions of childhood, beauty, and sentimentality, this book is for you. If you crave a frosty narrative voice with the whip and torque of a bitchy gymnast, this book is for you. It will make you smarter. And it will also upset your schema for the world--but you'll be glad, I promise.—Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere

Poet Candice Wuehle's irresistibly weird debut novel Monarch is the kind of book that you want to start reading again immediately after turning the last page — not just to trace the conspiracy at its heart, but to appreciate how its kaleidoscope of beauty pageants, Y2K anxieties, famous dead girls, and deep state machinations synthesizes into an exploration of what makes up a self.

Jessica Greenglass Clink self-consciously narrates Monarch as she attempts to make sense of how much of her life was ever her own. We start with her parentage. The daughter of Grethe, a Norwegian beauty queen, and Dr. Clink (always Dr. Clink), a professor at the fictional Midwestern University, Jessica is "basically like what would happen if Barbie and Dr. Strangelove had a lovechild." Swap nuclear war expertise with the study of extreme boredom and crimes of passion — research that gains notoriety in the wake of Lorena Bobbitt's trial — and you get Dr. Clink.

Though they live in what Jessica calls "the oeil de taureau of America" (that's French for bullseye), and though her 1990s adolescence is littered with the pop culture hallmarks of the decade—looping news footage of Nicole Brown Simpson's murder scene, the "ethereal yodeling" of The Cranberries, AOL CD-ROMs, tanning with a Playboy Bunny sticker on your hipbone — her upbringing is anything but average. She won't wake up to the clues of its sinister core until the end of the millennium. "The thing about being a teenager is that everything seems normal because nothing is normal," Wuehle writes, a diagnosis that feels apt until it isn't.

In the first half of Monarch, Wuehle conjures enthrallingly eccentric formative years for Jessica. She spends her days training for mother-daughter beauty pageants, helping Grethe at bizarre Tupperware parties as she demonstrates a plastic cryogenic freezer she sleeps in to halt the aging process, and traveling to her father's alma mater of Desert University — an "ivy-less Oxford" where Chancellor Lethe (like the river of oblivion) drills her with riddles in catechism.

This is a portentous crucible in which to be forged, compounded further by a home environment thrumming with "subtle panic." Only "essential personnel" are permitted inside this fortress where Dr. Clink manically draws up an academic journal issue responding to "the modern condition" (aka the internet) and Grethe stalks around the house with a knife "in a macabre before-bed ritual." Jessica originally assumes that Grethe, like many women who steep themselves in stories about misogynistic violence, was simply spooked into vigilance from watching too many episodes of her favorite true-crime and shadow history show, Unsolved Mysteries. But she notes in an aside to the reader, "Is this enough to explain to you why I believed there was some serious and maybe immediate violence always near me?"

Jessica's only tether to the outside world is her babysitter Christine, a Norwegian American riot grrrl in black lipstick who "possesse[s] an unfettered sense of revenge accessible only to people with a supreme, nearly supernatural sense of self-worth" — exactly what Jessica lacks. It is Christine who teaches Jessica to critically examine the power structures around her, to understand that "any kind of narrative [is] a blinder; the tiny screens that convince the horse there is only one path." And it is Christine who convinces Jessica to quit pageantry at age 13, after her coach forces her to sabotage fellow beauty queen Veronica Marshall — her first love, who gave her a taste of normal teenage life. Soon after, she begins waking up with a bitter, "bad-good" taste in her mouth, covered in bruises.

The reality of the violence Jessica felt near to her reveals itself gradually as she comes of age in her own body and soul. As the days count down to Y2K, Jessica, now 19, is working part-time a photography store. She develops photos reminiscent of JonBenét Ramsey's murder scene — a bloodbath that recalls for her "images of myself in another country, images of myself with bloody hands." In the second half of the novel, Jessica learns that she had been programmed as an agent in an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH, trained to transition between personas in order to gather intelligence.

Readers hungry for the motives of MONARCH — or even what the cryptonym means — won't find much here, a choice that pays off. Wuehle is less concerned with deep state spycraft than with the question of how to differentiate who we are from who we are programmed to be. Jessica's conditioning via pageantry (her coach was really a plant), Chancellor Lethe's schemes, and her parents' complicity puts this quandary to an extreme. But as Dr. Clink explains toward the end of the novel, all of us experience the difficulty of untangling our essence from our context: "My life has been the same as anyone's: I was born into a system and I never saw it from the outside." This makes for a far more interesting novel than the international espionage thriller it could have been without Wuehle's poetic, haunting touch.

"Power, Chancellor Lethe had once told me, is knowing the rules don't exist," Jessica reflects as she sets out on a quest — for feminist vengeance, for the truth about Veronica (was she yet another plant?), for her own self. As she breaks all the rules that the creators of MONARCH had instilled in her, instead drawing on Christine's lessons, Jessica takes control over the narrative of her life, the story that she is telling us now. Wuehle's decision to put the reins of pacing and structure in the hands of her narrator — who speaks many tongues and takes us through a "study in circles" until she is ready to "start talking about spirals" and drive us into the darkness of the underworld — reinforces the radical potential of having the final word.

Monarch is ultimately a story about stories: of Jessica's erasure and reinvention, of the Norwegian folklore that Grethe carried from her homeland, of true crime narratives that tell us that no one is more perfect than a dead girl, of memory and trauma and consciousness. Jessica's testimony reminds us that "nothing — no memory, impression, emotion, or idea — is ever lost." We can always remember who we are, even when the forces around us demand that we forget. - Kristen Martin

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089121396/a-sleeper-agent-pageant-queen-exacts-revenge-and-finds-herself-in-monarch

Every day, a new uncovering. People, places, and ideas are revealed to no longer be what they’d seemed to be. The tricky thing about masks is what they really show: the performative nature of the self and the fractured, amalgam nature of identity.

After we broke up, my high school ex instructed me to “remember who you were before we started dating.” This instruction followed a period of prolonged misery in which I attempted to convince him by any means possible to take me back: a revived relationship with his friends, petitions to return to that feeling from when we first started dating, and an email containing an entire monologue spoken by Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, which I’d dreamed he’d whispered in my ear before I went on stage to deliver some kind of speech. At the time, the performance of the dream felt unrelated to my life, but in retrospect, I think it may have foretold the life I was about to live. A year after the breakup, I acquired a collection of colorful wigs, could quote diligently from The Power of Now, and got mixed up into the world of immersive theater.

Immersive theater is a whole other beast from, say, the musical The Lion King. When people hear “immersive theater,” I assume the first thing that comes to mind is Punchdrunk’s Macbeth-inspired Sleep No More, a New York City site-specific theatrical installation that leads audience-participants through a series of well-decorated, dimly lit spaces. The immersive theater projects I got involved with shared some elements in common with the New York-based show, including an eclectic cast, an air of mystery, and a reliance on heavy, rouge-colored fabrics, but were different in their explicit content ratings and exclusivity. The main project I worked for was a members-only goth-themed nightclub set in an abandoned warehouse in Chicago (you had to follow a strict all-black dress code just to get in the door), catering mainly to rich and often Insta-famous partygoers. When one of the club owners first contacted me, I had to pass a strange and foreboding first test: “sending him a couple photos of myself.” He never asked to see my work, though my job would be to type sibylline, personalized poems for the partygoers.I got the job, and I was excited to get started. From the time I’d spent reading Ram Dass and other spiritual self-help books following my breakup, I’d come to believe that my “true self” was unstable, ever-changing—a blank slate capable of containing infinite multiplicities. The club was an opportunity to explore that fully. I could pick a new name. Wear a mask. I believed I was enacting some secret of the universe. Good on my word, I was remembering myself.

The protagonist of Candice Wuehle’s Monarch, Jessica Clink, learns to perform, to wear masks, from a very young age. A child beauty queen of the late nineties, Jessica is a self-proclaimed “brat” who decides she likes her babysitter enough “to allow her to behold her Caboodles of industry-grade cosmetics, her closet of tulle and sequin, her tiaras.” The narrator even refers to her own storytelling as a “performance.” Jessica’s pageantry is at the behest of both of her parents: her father, Dr. Clink, who regards his daughter “with the neutral attention a trainer gives to a show dog” and works as a professor of Boredom Studies at Midwestern University, and Jessica's mother, Grethe, a former pageant champion who looks less like Jessica’s mother and more like her doppelgänger. Jessica’s parents hire Crystal, the wife of one of her father’s colleagues, to work as Jessica’s pageant coach. Over time, Crystal teaches her to look in the mirror and “remove her entire face and replace it with another.” Eventually, Jessica removes the mirror itself, letting “various faces flow over” her in “the darkened basement rec room.”

On the eve of the goth club’s opening, we were asked to arrive early to meet the team and set up. I wore a black pinafore dress with a mesh, sparkly black undershirt, which, upon seeing the rest of the performers' outfits, I worried introduced too much light into the environment. No doubt, the other entertainers were more practiced: half of them were flown in from a club in LA, paying little attention to me as I unloaded my typewriter and basket of trinkets, including a turn-of-the-century blue medicine bottle and a taxidermied alligator head. It was allowed, I guess, for props to not be black. One of the women had covered her face, arms, and neck in weird, black marks that looked like alien script and wore clothes I can only describe as possessing an unnecessary amount of adaptable features: straps, buckles, random pockets. Another guy wore gloves that looked like they were made for riding motorcycles, a leather vest, and a skeletal mask with a cross stamped in the center of the forehead. Others wore dog collars and strappy lingerie.

The owners and senior performers led us in a conversation about consent as people lit a few stray candles and snagged one last drink before opening—guests would be brought into dark, secret rooms, asked to reveal their deepest fears, even blindfolded. "We want this to be a safe space," one of the club owners said. "Seductive, but not sexual," was the refrain. I wondered what exactly that looked like. What that meant. Then, we were sworn to secrecy, instructed to never reveal what happened in the club, or else face eternal banishment and other, unspecified consequences. I made the promise. "Seductive, but not sexual."

When Jessica falls in love with a fellow beauty queen, Veronica Marshall, her performances in pageantry begin to suffer. She stops practicing the mirror technique and rebels against Crystal. Finally, her memory begins to fail, or the facade of memory Crystal has implanted in her brain begins to crack: “I missed the step in a dance routine” or “I forgot to smile as I walked on stage.” Eventually, Jessica quits doing pageants altogether, and something insidious enters the narrative, a sense that she has been tricked into believing an essential lie about her personhood. “I, too, believed my mask was my face,” she relates. Following a particularly poignant experience in a church, Jessica begins to question the reality of this sentiment. She becomes fixated on the words of the priest, Corinthians 6:19-20: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.” Later, she pores over the priest’s words at her new job at the University photo lab. How much was she bought for? And by whom?

The private rooms were supposed to help guests transform their lives, somehow. Like the books that taught me to revel in my many-parted self, the rooms were of the New Age-y "self-help" genre, only sexually-charged (sorry, “seductively-charged”), monochromatic, and full of drugs and alcohol. Some performers had jobs as "runners." They were responsible for locating prospective initiates and leading them to the private rooms’ top-secret locations. Twenty minutes before the doors opened that first night, after one of the owners handed me a little black membership card with the addendum that I should return it to him afterward (so, technically, my membership was only temporary, and so too, my oath to secrecy), one of the runners approached me and held out her hand. She looked at me with eyes that stank of the allure of some mischievous, unknown, future event, and I knew then what the owners meant when they encouraged us to use our powers of "seduction.” Refusing her hand, while technically permitted, would have placed me in a position adverse to the entire operation: the girl, the owners, the coolness of the club, the "privilege" to have been chosen as an initiate.

She led me out past the dance floor and down a flight of stairs, then through a set of heavy black doors, around a turn, down another flight of stairs. It was a kind of preparatory disorientation, being spun around and around, though I had no knowledge either of where or what my target was. We came to the basement. There were still pizza boxes, liquor-infused chocolates, and black lipstick strewn about from when the cast had gotten ready just half an hour before. I didn't see anyone as we walked across the large, open room, but it was brightly lit, a stark contrast to the candlelight illuminating the rest of the building. This was the only time I felt I could be in over my head. Something about the backstagedness of the space raised an alarm in me, but the alarm's sound came and went. I only need put on the mask of my courageous self and I would get through it.

What actually happened in the private rooms was less memorable, to be honest. In fact, every ritual I participated in at the club reminded me of the kinds of games I used to invent with my friends at sleepovers in the mid-2000's, except these were less inspired. I entered a room of three or four hooded figures covered head to toe in thick, black covers. It was kind of like entering a poorly-lit, gothic office and meeting a group of expectant, dementor-like business people. The girl, my runner, left and closed the door behind her, and one of the dementors shouted, "Sit!" I sat on the carpeted floor. Then, one of them turned their head and began to speak in a constructed language. It sounded otherworldly, alien-like, punctuated by clicks, consonant-heavy. In English, another one asked me, "what do you desire?" They gestured at three magical-looking objects laid out on the coffee table in front of me. I picked something. It was cube-like. They told me what it meant. That part I don't remember.

The sequined veil of Jessica’s beauty pageant life unravels even further when signs that she has been unwittingly involved in a deep-state operation start to appear. After uncovering a series of disturbing photos of herself with bloody hands in another country, Jessica begins to have intense nightmares from which she wakes up in actual pain and with in-the-flesh bruises, unable to identify their source. Eventually, it is revealed that she is a Multi-Dimensional Identity Acquisitor, part of the MKUltra offshoot MONARCH, which means she has several different “personas” she can “transition” into, each with “its own memories, education, talents, languages, gestures, postural and muscle memory.” The program is run by Jessica’s father, and every moment of significance in Jessica’s life no longer belongs to her. Jian, a fellow MONARCH agent, explains to Jessica why a recurring dream of hers does not reflect reality:

They do that to you girls. They implant narratives in your dreams so that you don’t ask questions in life. Mostly they do it to the honeypots, they implant these vivid dreams of fucking strangers so that the girls don’t wonder what compels them to seduce the assets. They think it was their own idea.

We tend to think of violence as an explicit physical act, as something we can see, but some of the worst violences are those which are less visible. It’s their invisibility that creates their treachery.

I worked at the goth club for six months, typing poems for people in that musty service elevator, warding off the advances of older men, occasionally requesting that some couple who’d decided to take over the booth I was stationed at when I went on break please find a different place to make out. Eventually, the owners decided the model didn’t work in Chicago like it did in LA (“the people weren’t cool enough” is what they’d supposedly said), and they shut down the operation. Then, a few years later, I discovered the LA club had closed its doors following a slew of sexual misconduct allegations. Multiple performers and guests had reported uncomfortable interactions to the club’s higher-ups, and they failed to do anything about it. They failed to see and acknowledge the environment they’d created. And it was easy, I suppose (actually, it was the perfect breeding ground) for perpetrators to hide behind the club’s boundary-pushing aesthetic, for them to believe their own convenient lies: that saying “yes” in that environment was ever a free expression of consent. That harassment doesn’t happen in the nuances of everyday interaction, in the presence of others. That the structures that enable such abuses of power aren’t intricately woven into everyday life.

Initially, I thought the irony of my ex’s advice to “remember who I was before we started dating” was contained in the fact that the person I’d discovered once I actually went on that journey was anything but a single entity. I was many, multiple, the potential to play the role of anyone, fearless, reveling in that mystery. Now, I look back on what he said and read the irony in a new way. His request is an impossible feat, lacking awareness of what it means to live in the truth that as a woman, my “self” was always shaped by men like him. Like Jessica, I was full of implanted narratives. All potential versions were impure, influenced. And like Jessica, I used my art to survive. As she says, “this is the story of the creature’s creature. At some point, monsters learn to create their own art.” Even the perceived “spiritual understanding” I had gained, my journey into mystical ideas about the self’s multiplicity and capacity for play, the thing that got me into immersive theater in the first place, can be read as another way I tried to cope following the traumatic relationship with my ex. Nothing is sacred or immune.

But Monarch offers us some hope. It contains glimpses of experiences Jessica may understand as truly hers, the most prominent being her love relationship with Veronica: “The idea was that if everything about her had been someone else’s idea, then that feeling with Veronica could only be her own.” There are certain felt experiences that can, maybe, escape the system of patriarchal influence. Perhaps the utility of masks, of the self’s fracturing, can be redeemed, depending on the shard of mirror you salvage. - Elise Houcek

https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/candice-wuehle-monarch

Luke Rolfes: Candice Wuehle is the author of several books of poetry, and, recently, the novel Monarch from Soft Skull Press—a wonderfully weird and beautiful book that takes readers on a strange journey from beauty pageants to Boredom Studies to micro-chipped government operatives. Thanks so much for talking with us, Candice!

I’d love to hear about the genesis of Monarch and what influenced this particular novel. Where did you get the idea not just for this story but this style of story?

Candice Wuehle: The plot is based on a real conspiracy theory that asserts a secret wing of the CIA, Operation MONARCH, recruits agents from beauty pageant contests because they possess a specific skill set—they’re attractive, obedient, and charming. From there, I developed my own childhood fixation on the murder of JonBenèt Ramsey into a story about a young woman much like her who lives, grows up, discovers she’s been an unwitting agent in a deep state program and takes her revenge on the forces that placed here there.

How I came upon this style of story is very related to research I was doing toward the end of my doctorate on trauma studies. I was really interested in the idea that trauma is marked by its unspeakability as well as its tendency to emerge in a non-linear manner, so the style is intended to represent the unpredictable, peripatetic mode not so much of speaking about trauma, but speaking through it.

LR: Following up on that, were there any movies, music, books, art pieces that were influential in your shaping, or that you see as companion pieces? This book is set in the late 1990s. Did you, for instance, listen to a bunch of mixed CDs from the time period to ground yourself in that moment?

CW: MONARCH dialogues with a pretty wide spectrum of inspirations and references, ranging from ‘90s dark comedies (like Drop Dead Gorgeous) to more canonical films about memory (like La Jetée). I’ve always been really obsessed with glitching in storytelling and I think the one element that unites all the different texts that went into writing MONARCH is the idea that a narrative can malfunction the same way memory malfunctions. In ‘90s dark comedies, this comes across for me in the tone—the way that these movies are aware of the culture they satirize, yet they also propagate that culture because they’re a part of it. In La Jetée, the glitch is much more direct. An actual screen freezing, a distortion.

As for mixed CDs, I actually didn’t listen to much music from the time period to ground myself. I mainlined pop culture so hard in the ‘90s that it’s pretty ingrained! Instead, I listened to what I thought the main character would be listening to, which was Joy Division, The Smiths, and a lot of actual white noise. This is a book about a person inventing a personality, so I wanted the tonal backdrop I worked into either be blank or totally affected.

LR: Monarch could potentially fall under many different labels of genre: Speculative fiction? Science fiction? Experimental? Postmodern? Sci-Horror? Slipstream? Did labels and whether or not your work fit under a certain genre matter to you in the conceptualizing of this book? Did you start out saying “I want to write a science fiction novel,” or did you let the story take you in whatever direction it wanted to go?

CW: I love this question! I was on a sci-fi panel at the LA Times Book Festival, which was a great experience, but I definitely felt out of place! So, no, I never intended to write any kind of novel other than literary. You’re right to guess that I just let the story go in the direction that it wanted to go in. I suppose I never worried about genre because most of my favorite books defy genre—I think of Orlando by Virginia Woolf, of Margret Atwood’s novels, of Kafka. Honestly, when I start thinking of books I think are great, it’s much harder for me to think of one that is solidly within a genre than one that is hybrid in some way. I went to one of Selah Saterstrom’s Sunday divination writing workshops recently, where she spoke about the three of hearts as the tarot card of hybrid genre because, to quote her really roughly, “all emotional stories are pierced by multiple ways of telling.” I don’t just believe that—I don’t know any other way to tell a story.

LR: The novel begins in a fairly recognizable reality—well, reality adjacent, perhaps. The setting, at least, is grounded in 90’s tropes that early Millennials and Generation Xers remember. Early on, we are treated to some vignettes and images of grisly nightmares, but we don’t know how Jessica (the narrator) fits into the strange world of beauty pageants, nighttime bruises, and odd parents who don’t seem to belong to normal, suburban society. The major speculative and sci-fi elements aren’t revealed until the middle of the book, and that is when readers get to see the uniqueness of Jessica’s identity and plight more fully. I really liked the pacing and slow build of this book, how the mystery of the world unraveled like a tightly wound ball of thread. Can you talk about managing the release of information in this novel? Was it hard to keep so much close to the vest early on?

CW: Yes!! As I got closer and closer to the end of the book, it became increasingly difficult to keep pace because I just really wanted to get to the book’s major reveals. Discipline is obvious a big part of writing—you have to write to, you know, be a writer, and you have to do that pretty much every day—but this book required a lot of discipline in terms of the plot pacing, especially at the end. Early drafts of this book jump pretty abruptly, in part because I wanted to make sure I got to those major plot points, and because I couldn’t wait! For me, a lot of writing a first draft is really just entertaining myself. Later drafts are for other people, so that’s where I step back and try to look at the pacing and the questions that haven’t yet been answered or the relationships that haven’t been fully explored and then re-pace by incorporating that information. I’m really lucky to have first readers who understand what I’m trying to do and who give me feedback that’s more geared toward pointing to what can be filled in than what can be totally restructured. They make the novel more itself, they help accentuate significant themes and characters. In short, the answer to these questions is pretty workshop 101: I draft, I get feedback, I have fun and make a mess early on and then I clean it up for a long time.

LR: Speaking of the 90s, Monarch gives readers tons of pop culture references. OJ Simpson trial, Lorena Bobbitt, Y2K, mixed CDs, just to name a few. Can you tell us what about this particular decade appealed so much to you for this narrative? Would this have been a different book if it were, say, set in the late 80’s or early 2000’s?

CW: Yeah, that’s a great question. The book naturally emerged as set in the ‘90s because I was aligning it with the death of JonBenèt Ramsey to some extent. And, of course, I grew up in the ‘90s and am pretty much the same age as Jessica, the main character (actually, in reference to your previous question—one way I kept track of the threads of the novel was to simply make Jessica’s birthday my own, which really did help ground me in the wash of cultural and political life at the time).

The book would certainly be different if set in the ‘80s or early 2000s. MONARCH is really engaged in beauty culture and fashion and trends as well as in the late ‘90s as a sort of fin de siècle, an end of everything but also a transformation. Themes of presentation, death, and a fetishization of death via beauty culture (anorexic models, heroin chic, etc.) as well as the Y2K obsession with prophesy and end times (I feel like there was a new Nostradamus documentary on the History Chanel every weekend of ’99!) shape the texture of the book quite a bit.

LR: A theme in this book is youth trauma (and violence). A scene that sticks with me is when Jessica experiments with the Dead Ringers (a neighborhood youth “fight club”). Jessica, for the first time, steps outside of her body, and can do things she didn’t think were possible. Her experience with Dead Ringers reminds me, vaguely, of her time in the beauty pageants. Can you talk a bit about the role of trauma in this book? Was it difficult to marry this theme with the speculative/sci-fi threads?

CW: The sci-fi thread actually emerged because this is a book about trauma, I think. One thing that gets said again and again about trauma is that its “unspeakable,” right? It both cannot and must be spoken, thus trauma survivors tend to depend heavily on metaphor until they retrieve or develop the language that can express their experience. The sci-fi element of this book (about freezing in a chamber that halts the aging process) is one extended metaphor that plays on the idea of the freeze trauma response. One of the moments that I think about the most from my coursework on trauma studies is watching the testimony of K-Zetnik in the Eichmann trial and reading Shoshana Felman’s incredible analysis of this testimony in her book, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the Twentieth Century. In short, K-Zetnik was a survivor as well as a writer and when called upon to testify about his imprisonment at Auschwitz, he frequently employed metaphor. The court requested he contain his remarks to facts, which he attempted to do until eventually collapsing on the witness stand. It’s not just “easier” to discuss traumatic events through metaphor; it’s sometimes only possible to discuss them through metaphor. Sci-fi is often an extended metaphor, so discussing the structure of trauma through this genre seemed intuitive to me.

LR: I loved the college section of this book, especially the characters in the dormitory and the dynamic between them. My brother went to University of Iowa, and he lived in an off-campus building called Mayflower—which is the name of the dorm in the book. Just out of curiosity, is that dorm an inspiration for the one in Monarch?

CW: Yes, It absolutely is! You’re only the second person to ask that. I was always fascinated with the Mayflower dorm at Iowa (where I did my undergraduate) because there was a rumor of a triple suicide in which three girls jump off the dorm’s roof and then haunt the dorm. So, that rumor emerges in MONARCH during Jessica’s time there. I just looked for evidence of this ghost story online and I can’t find anything, so it must not be a big part of campus lore. It’s possible I knew some people who lived in that dorm that believed it was haunted? It’s really odd to write about a memory, because at some point you realize how much you’ve modified it.

LR: Reflections (physical and figurative) come up time and again. In the climax of the book, Jessica sees her reflection on steel boxes, and she seems to ruminate on the idea that her identity is bigger than the self. Why did you see that particular moment as the end of her journey? Is it the end?

CW: One of the ideas that interested me most while writing MONARCH was the idea of where one’s identity actually comes from. How much is shaped by family, culture, education, and how much of your identity are you born with? I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of the Original Face (which is featured in a college lecture Jessica attends at one point in MONARCH), which is the concept of “the face you had before your parents were born.” I think her journey ends with this thought of the Self going onward and curling tendrils into the future because only a person who has truly come to “know thyself” can intentionally extend beyond what’s right in front of them. To put this differently, I mean that really knowing your own motivations and desires and truths can allow you to see yourself outside of context(s), which is/are inherently always decided by other people.

Yeah, I think this is the end for Jessica. I see her as a character that has answered the major questions of her life and now has to do the work of existing. To quote Anne Carson, “to live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” As hinted in the epigraph to MONARCH, Jessica gets to a place where she survives, but she doesn’t really live after the trauma she’s endured. I’m not saying people who endure trauma don’t come to live full lives eventually, but I do want to provide a representation of a character that isn’t there yet. Healing takes a long, long time and before that long time, there’s the long time of just being—and that’s where Jessica ends MONARCH.

LR: What’s next for you and your writing?

CW: I’m tentatively working on a companion to MONARCH that goes back to the origins of MONARCH, MKUltra, and Jessica’s parents. I thought of this book while writing MONARCH, so there are certainly some open ends or oddities in MONARCH that will be addressed in its prequel, if it ever comes to be.

More immediately, I’m finishing up my next novel, which is about a ballerina who joins a cult that choreographs a ballet to end the world. It’s inspired in part by Russian occultist and composer Alexander Scriabin. Like MONARCH, this next novel deals with performance and memory, however the idea of the listener or witness to memory is a more integral aspect. So—another weird plot with serious ideas told in the voice of, like, your annoyed older sister.

https://laurelreview.org/candice-wuehle-interview

Candice Wuehle, FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed, 11:11 Press, 2021

‘Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed navigates interior landscapes, personal cosmology, and the manner in which language shapes our being and being shapes our language via acts of séance, tarot, alchemical interpretation, and psychoanalysis. These are poems written in the wild swing of the scrying stone, poems that ask how to create an identity in the way of perpetual change, constant self-interrogation, and ever shifting psychogeography. What does it mean to live in the orb of uncertainty? To be neither here nor there, neither fixed nor fluxed?’ 

FIDELITORIA IS WHERE POETRY AND SORCERY WALTZ TOGETHER. CANDICE WUEHLE HAS A MASTERFUL LENS ON THE VEILED EXTRAORDINARY OF OUR WORLD. POETRY REORIENTS ITSELF TO EPISTLE THEN BACK AGAIN, WITH A STRENGTH AND DIRECTION I LONG FOR IN EVERY POET'S WORK, "FRISK YOUR OWN NATURE MOST ARDENTLY, ADORN YOUR EDGES WITH BLOOD-BRUISES."— CACONRAD

THERE IS AN IRRESISTIBLE MELANCHOLY OF CHAOS LIVING HERE, BINDING AND UNWINDING LIKE TREE'S LEAVES AND SEASONAL DIURNAL GOWNS, NOT RESISTING A FLUORESCENT MEDIUM OF ABUNDANCE AND SNOW. HERE THE SPEAKER TRAVELS THROUGH HER OWN TONGUE TO FIND HERSELF OVER AND OVER, IN HERBS, IN ALIENS, IN THE QUIET SPECTACULAR. IN THE BANQUET OF TAROT AND BUCOLIC POETRY, WHERE THE LEXICAL GRASS GROWS THINGS SUCH AS PROHILIL AND EXNIHIL WHILE THE POET TAKES US THROUGH HER UNDERTONE OF LUGUBRIOUS SURRENDER. TIMELESS AND ELONGATED, WITH REPETITIVE MANTRA THAT BEHAVE HYPNOTICALLY LIKE FALLING FLORAL FAUNAS, CANDICE WUEHLE HOPES, IN THIS WILD SPELLBINDING OF LEXICAL RESTFULNESS, TO ACHIEVE ACCRETION OF SELF THROUGH THE ORACULAR AMNESIA OF SELF.— VI KHI NAO

FIDELITORIA COMPRISES NOTHING LESS THAN A DECK OF SPELLS—SPILLING OVER WITH POEMS THAT SEETHE AS THEY SEEK OUT WHATEVER’S BEYOND THE LIMITS OF BECOMING. I FEEL CAN THE WARP OF ALICE NOTLEY’S NECROMANCY, AND PERHAPS THE WEFT, TOO, OF HANNAH WEINER’S CLAIRVOYANT VISIONS. YET WEUHLE’S POETICS SUMMON HER OWN “ZODIACAL DARKENING”—BOTH LUCID AND SPOOKY—AS SHE THREADS HEX-LIKE VERSES INTO A ROILING HALLUCINATION. I HAVEN’T BEEN THIS ECSTATICALLY DISTURBED BY A COLLECTION OF POETRY SINCE I WAS SOMEBODY ELSE. TAKE THIS WEIRD BOOK WITH YOU WHERE YOU’RE GOING. OR DON’T—AND SUFFER. BUT YOU’VE BEEN WARNED NOW, HAVEN’T YOU?— JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON

CANDICE WUEHLE’S FIDELITORIA: FIXED OR FLUXED IS A DYNAMIC, ENTHRALLING COLLECTION WHOSE ELECTRIC LIVE WIRE LINES TWITCH AND QUAKE AS ALL DIVINATIONS DO—ANIMATED WITH EXCESS WISDOM AND ANCIENT ENERGIES. THESE POEMS ARE SEARING, CELEBRATORY, AND INTIMATE; WUEHLE USES POETRY AS A CONDUIT BETWEEN BEWILDERMENT AND FORECAST, UTTERANCE AND OCCULT, TRAUMA AND PAIN SONG, ARCHIVE AND DIRT. THE SPIRITS ARE HERE, AND WUEHLE WARNS “ONE THING YOU CAN’T DO / IS GO BACK AND DRAW THE CARDS / IN THE TIME BEFORE.” LET THESE POEMS SERVE AS CLUES TO OUR SHARED FATE.— CARYL PAGEL

Excerpt:

Demiurge

As if a blueprint of author’s imagined

garden could begin without the 28 leathern paws

of 7 unassigned dogs halting, holding

their howls at the edge. If you draw me a map

I won’t find you. This poem is for the cartographer

offering an alternate arcadia, I mean, a third

arcana. I mean I believe in spoil, wineskins accelerating

unlit wars, ending ends. As if this poem

isn’t populated with obese angels and outsized

stars, muzzled strong-men. But this poem is also

for black smart phone screens not networked

or worked and inelegant without intelligence,

molly-mirror unreflective of the un-shiny other’s

intent, only an idea in abstraction upon lack

of electrification. This poem is clearly for myself

alone. My mother may have wrapped me in

a cloud. Because of this arrangement, I have

insisted on some theories regarding Ash and Hair.

Instead, I ask myself if I mean Vapor and Ocean,

Air. I got good at this somewhere and now I need

to get de-skilled; I am now only a spouse

to my true nature, a digger of foundation, fence

posts. True. I have stayed here long enough to

achieve, and now my arms are the arms of evident

strength. I really want to be the one in the kitchen,

inhaling mint, wetted basil: artifacts of exposed

hearth. Upon first encounter,

sugar was qualified as honey without bees. This seems to

suggest that strength—for a Cashiered Soldier or Bad

Poet—is only intention without integrity. Howls

echo in the uncharted empty even if the animals are

not near; the nature of the canyon is to act and act again;

reverberation. I mean to admit I remain

in the self-styled wild

not out of an attitude of endurance

but in avoidance of the ultra

charted zone, the solid city

structured and clay-hardened.

Upon identification of the subject,

I collapse. Just as I cannot kiss the counter,

I cannot, cannot caress the fur of the domestic dog,

I cannot even accept

the rope

that made the animal so,

can only

insist a cloud

cannot be contained

or rent

Soft

Sort of error. My real hair, unhinged

from my head. Was I a blonde-girl

anymore or an experimental light, a

way for others to see through water,

ashes? I have already said what I am afraid

of. Yonder. I ask my father on the other

end about procession, peaceful

parting: Candie, keep yourself and give

your things. He means give up, give

way. Keep falling from windows

in order to assure the greatness of your

own height, if only to be the wreck

of your own pure lightness. Only

on a second story hotel balcony, bonds

can be broken with the world one

can come to skim, to see as surface. Chlorinated,

incalculable current unbearable without

tallied reflections. Stop. In the rented

room’s mirror, the face I deserve and under-

neath, another atmosphere I have never

endured: I doubt it is oceanic, operable

by infallible salts or expanse of warm blues,

cool blues. An indigo, a lapis, a lazuli. Instead

I suspect a smallness

No—a clarity

No—a clarity

No—a clarity,

a cross at a crossing,

a dryness delivering, upending as does specifically dirt

in demand of a grave. Just

a thin yield, as earth under blade, giving

to pressure within freeze, shale.

I know the odd dumb organ breaks

beneath my breasts, never showing

and only even aware of itself because of the

occasioned hand pushing back my hair to comment

I can hear your

self. Have I already said

what I am afraid of; I have already

tried to fuse this, this

bare flicker

nude synapse

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Candice Wuehle

Candice Wuehle, Bound, 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

Candice Wuehle, DEATH INDUSTRIAL

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

“i have a compulsion to place a mirror on every tombstone.”

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

Does this book expect you to hold its heels as it hovers? Does it want you to see it crawl from a tv set and then lock fingers with its girlish ghost? Is a mirror a weapon? Is ekphrasis a ghost mirror? Is there a stage, can you see it sideways, do you see the veil now? Do you take pleasure in the kind of gazing that turns your eyes into shimmery séance light? Do you want access to the “gate out of this world”? You bet your sweet ass you do, reader. “You can get married to a thing they say doesn’t even exist.” Did you see that glitch? Did you feel it in your curtain-y skeleton? Can you hear this call to cult from the broken record player, you little glitch baby?

“This is a story about how clothing was invented,” and sometimes this is an ekphrastic act, a companion text to the images and biography of Francesca Woodman, sometimes it’s memoir via possession (but how it defies “the petty/ contours of memoir”!), sometimes it’s poems as organelles, sometimes a study in trachophobia (fear of speed), sometimes a treatise on light and fashion and parents, sometimes an inquiry—deliciously terrifying—into “the extra stuff.” The stuff that impossibly lingers around liminal gates, salt crystals, “the rivulet of oil between/ the living dermis and the dead fil/ aments” of the scalp, light from the corner of a room, “pure gothic deep inside the erotic.”

I absolutely love the world of this book. It’s “something that sounds like bubbles of air bursting on the water’s surface” and that is the only place I ever, truly, want to be. It writes with both hands so that it can touch itself in the middle. It killed mary jane shoes. It made itself the gate and refused to demur because some lipsticks are better than others/ for writing your name on a mirror.” —Olivia Cronk

Candice Wuehle: An Interview by Paul Cunningham

Candice Wuehle, EARTH* AIR*FIRE*WATER*ÆTHER, Grey Books Press, 2015.

The first chapbook (and winning chapbook) of the 2014/2015 “season” is Candice Wuehle’s EARTH * AIR * FIRE *WATER * ÆTHER.  We knew right away it was going to be a contender with a fluidity that seems so easy and natural.  And at the same time, there’s a real weight, a presence.  It’s at once adventurous and cohesive . . . a poetic masterwork.



From “FIRE”:
“I open up my laptop
and write against
history===I update
the browser, I keep shopping. I open to
The Guardian, to Forever 21, to Netflix. I  
buy nothing most days but I do
some days. I’m here. I think of if there is anywhere my body
my whole thing
can’t go now, I think of the fire
wall, I think of you.”



Candice Wuehle, VIBE CHECK, curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs,