BLOODLETTER by David Kuhnlein
140 x 215mm, 114 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, softcover, comes with four postcards, 2024
"Half our clothes are on the floor. The other half hang from the ceiling. Labyrinthine flesh-piles make a staircase. Polishing the soot off a breast with my sleeve, I dance horizontally. The band regurgitates into their instruments to slow the tempo, blowing catchy bubbles of sick. Sweat snows upward, stagnant when we see ourselves pooled within it, mosquitoes in a tin can. Vestigial, amoebic replications, abominable degenerations of the ape, totems fucked through stained glass. I toast the trash. Out of mounds, shaved together into a consciousness, a golden star excretes, floating toward me in a mist, apples singed in her teenaged hair, waist the width of a cigarette. I’m going to bugger her so hard they’ll have to put a serial number on the headstone. “If I’m to your taste, mister, this might spell the end for you.” What more could I ask of a woman? A heart condition of a child, torqued to breed too soon. I offer dialectic fugues, 77 press her forehead, cast a sigil tuned to the cacophony around us. Swaying, she enters a canyon trance, plummeting under magma. Beautiful funerals for all my friends. Remember me as an itch."
"David Kuhnlein writes like he’s casting a spell. Bloodletter is entrancingly evil, every sentence a revelation and a curse: “How much can you care for someone if you can’t afford to dress them in a body bag? ” A grotesque world unfurls from his searing prose: “Ghosts reveal their measurements in smoke, different shades, more rings in the middle if they died long ago. Satan can’t keep up.” Blood sacrifices have never been so beautiful". —Danielle Chelosky
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