FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed
Candice Wuehle
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
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?
ISBN: 9781948687522(ebook)
ISBN: 9781948687270 (paperback)