Excerpts from Candice Wuehle’s poetry manuscript, BOUND, a finalist for the 2015 TS Book Prize.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Candice Wuehle is the author of the chapbooks curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and EARTH*AIR*FIRE*WATER*ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015). Her work can be found in The Volta, The Colorado Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Spork, and Prelude, among others. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Candice currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow at The University of Kansas as well as Poetry Editor for Beecher’s Magazine.
AUTHOR STATEMENT
I sincerely misremembered the hook of Blondie’s “Sunday Girl”—“hurry up and wait”—to be the same exact words, or at least the same sentiment, as T.S. Eliot’s “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” while I was writing many of the poems in BOUND. This was the mistake that makes more sense than the truth; I think the voice of the Debbie Harry’s manic and single-minded Sunday Girl and Eliot’s polyphonic chorus melded in my mind while making BOUND exactly because this book is a fixed cite of deconstruction, of insistence on Gertrude Stein’s “act is if there is no use in a centre.” This is voiced through the most fervent, unlikely and therefore articulate mouthpieces; young girls, ghosts, unfailable and totally fallible aptitude tests, un-entered GPS destinations, unforgotten fairy tales and unforgettable youtube videos. These poems inhabit, and unapologetically overtake, the liminal zone from which these disembodied voices speak. Like Blondie’s Sunday Girl, herself the somnambulant sentinel who has “been awake all week,” the poems in BOUND fall asleep and wake up, die and resurrect, only to attempt to prove the only stability exists in again destabilizing to prove the stability that existed before. As does the cryptic resonance of the word “bound” itself, with its suggestion of moving towards or being entwined to, these poem exhibit the energy of desiring everything and doing nothing, of remaining faithful to the vocation of formless existence in acknowledgement that it’s possible we’re going nowhere, hurry up.
Further reading:
The Volta: “SOFT”
Smoking Glue Gun: “Another Sunday”
Spoon River Poetry Review: “The Word”
Printer’s Devil Review: “Lost to Space”