GO FULL POLTERGEIST
a review of David Kuhnlein’s Decay Never Came
GO FULL POLTERGEIST
David Kuhnlein. Decay Never Came. Maximus Books, 2023. 36 pages.
The text of this chapbook is less than forty pages long but it can’t be read in a hurry. It can’t be gobbled up like a small package of black licorice. Slow down and take each line in one by one. You are now reading at the slowest setting of the necro-metronome. The book’s title is Decay Never Came so you have to jump into a different, longer timescale to get what the poems are doing, and even then you may not. There’s a strong atmosphere of aesthetic death throughout the collection, the beauty in death, or maybe more accurately, the beauty of a body’s biological trajectory plus inevitable time. “Herniated before I was biology, in decay that never came,” Kuhnlein writes in the titular poem. And maybe it didn’t, but was perhaps expected to since we have passed into the empirical envelope of death. Bodies, in Kuhnlein’s world, are sites for exhibiting value-neutral damage, illness, injury. In “Wooden Spoon,” the speaker of the poem likens bruises suffered in BDSM encounters to stars, saying “I’d let you whack an entire history of / hot white stars // the galaxies in me! & isn’t it funny / how pleasure w/in pain / & not the other way around surrounds / me // w/ pieces of the everyday”
In “Bloodborne” we seem to eavesdrop on a corpse asking “is this a body bag or a river I’m in”:
My fingerprints dehisce their perimeter
Like psychotropics darting through blood
Red ants bite me in swells of cursive
Relatives’ prayers teem, gleaning as they flay
I’m stuffed into a burlap sack…
The weak taxidermy of my surname thaws
Ashes melt up my knuckles without me
A morbid tone pervades the collection, which is nothing new, but what tends toward the original about Kuhnlein’s writing is the spectacular variety of phraseology about bodies in extremity, the chorus of voices singing about rot, abuse, or even just some other living morphology. Several poems describe sea lifeforms with a fascination that is not as gothic as the rest of the productions might be (to resort to idiotic shorthand: “gothic” is a term prone to some of the worst misprision and I apologize for using it here—and yet Kuhnlein is unquestionably macabre). Starfish, sand dollars, and seahorses have dreams shaped by anatomy known to science but alien to human creatures. “Pacific townsfolk crave my cross-shaped uteri,” the sand dollar apostrophizes. It isn’t clear whether the speaker in “Starfish” is a starfish or is addressing a starfish, but some form of relationship is being referenced:
My bag of blotted capillaries eversible inside my oral disk
I scarf your milk teeth, suction cup shoes, and pillowcase tongues
My weeping thirst carves a singular grave
For us in this ruin of beach sans melody
As the cackling sun crisps your tendons to mine, alphabetically
Kuhnlein’s vocab choices have just enough clarity to meaningfully refer to things but just enough reverb to put you under a cloak. A somnolent gel floods all spaces, like that seen in the surreal cover photography for old 4AD records or in Brothers Quay animations. You’re having a nightmare but it’s hypnotizing in its beauty and the really bad part hasn’t happened yet. It’s an atmospheric buildup.
Kuhnlein recently wrote a short zine’s worth of film reviews, horror movies, called Six Six Six, and his facility with coming up with fresh, engaging language was on display there as it is here. But the poetry is perhaps hazier because the goals are more abstract than “communicating to you about some more or less fixed popular culture.” Writing that can swerve into the territory of spooky phantasmagoria and still come back out as original is not so easy to come by. Decay Never Came does manage to have the lineaments of that. My main criticism of the collection is that it might have had too much the lifespan of a gentle moth as opposed to some organism that was more robust and sustained over time. Chapbooks are like micro-ghosts trying to scare up a living room when what Kuhnlein needs is to unleash a poltergeist, something destructive that breaks doors, shatters mirrors, melts fireplaces, inspires more elemental fears. But, I have yet to go to the Béla Kiss-ing booth that Kuhnlein has apparently been constructing (Kiss being the notorious Hungarian child-murderer), so there’s a lot I don’t know yet about his broader work. Maybe I don’t want to see Kuhnlein go full poltergeist.
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Here’s a YouTube video of an album that is a collaboration between krautrock outfit Faust and experimental/industrial artist Nurse with Wound. It’s good background music.