Die Closer to Me by David Kuhnlein, Merigold Independent, 2023
I read David Kuhnlein’s Die Closer to Me over the course of several months, an experience like occasionally visiting a spookhouse where after being blindfolded your hand is thrust into a bucket of eyeballs, monster guts, zombie brains. The shock of fresh dissociation. Die Closer to Me revels in sticky red immaculate prose, the better to mirror the viscous ooze of bodily fluid that permeates these pages. Surgical and genetic experiment and transmutation abound, bounty hunters brood, drugs are dispensed with abandon. It’s a bit of a shitshow, a purposeful and puss-laden shitshow; Kuhnlein’s approach to body horror works brilliantly, as these linked narratives oscillating between a blanched Earth and the planet Süskind, a sphere reserved for the disabled, perform a literal amputating of lived experience the like of which disabled persons have been subjected to since the worm of humankind squelched its way out of the electric mud. Biting social critique aside, the writer in me found in the latter half of the book a kindred trickster spirit, in which priests and poets intermingle while abusing and being misused by the fecal tides of fate’s whimsy. I love this line: “Father Marquez flipped over the poems and wondered what kind of life it would be to write and seek approval. Not a good one, he decided.” In fact, given that the Urban Dictionary defines “suskind” as “a person, formerly believable, who attempts to revive his fading career by writing a book filled with exaggeration, innuendo and outrageous lies,” maybe trickster is the defining characteristic of DCTM, Kuhnlein all the while toying with us, playing a fantastic sport, the book a mangled Art dangling its twisted entrails over paper and smearing bloodword after bloodword—the sharpened point of that capital-A impaled through lung: can you still breathe, or are you done for?