On Hysteria, Nancy Kuhl’s fourth collection of poems, is a lyric
engagement of voice, memory, longing, and the fraught ways we speak
ourselves. In conversation – and sometimes conflict – with
Sigmund Freud’s foundational text of psychoanalysis Studies on
Hysteria (1895), Kuhl reframes the discourse surrounding cases of
so-called hysterical girls and women, expanding and shifting given
narratives. With intensity and emotion, On Hysteria examines how
ideas may be converted into physical symptoms, thought collapsed
into sensation, articulation fused with forceful action. Above all,
Kuhl’s poems consider ways suffering itself becomes unbounded
expression: “Her pain is a voice / pulled by handfuls / from the
throat.” These poems are--to use a term central to the
collection--glossed with disquiet, shifting between direct speech
and a kind of pressurized, violent speechlessness. Reading this
collection is like watching half-salvaged clips of a family's home
movie interspersed with time-lapse photos capturing the formation
and dissolution of rocks: the spliced film is riveting, a "horizon
set down between / limit and limitlessness." -Catherine Barnett,
author of Human Hours Something profound, elusive, and shattering
haunts these poems. In this work, a kind of “field guide” to
the soul, an extraordinary sensibility moves delicately yet
searchingly through the holdfasts of mind, memory, and touch. And
everywhere too we encounter a poet alive to rocks, stones, trees,
lichens, mosses, to the texture of fabrics and the structures of
art, to the “sky open to the hinge,” to “the brink, the
joint, the skim, the skin.” This is vital, unsettling,
transformative work. -Maureen N. McLane, author of More Anon:
Selected Poems Making poetry and psychoanalysis seem of a piece,
Kuhl manages in this remarkable and unusual book to write poems at
once poignant, incisive and lyrical about experiences that are
uncanny in their ordinariness. -Adam Phillips, author of Becoming
Freud
General
Imprint: |
Shearsman Books
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
July 2022 |
Authors: |
Nancy Kuhl
|
Dimensions: |
216 x 140 x 5mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
80 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-84861-837-4 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-84861-837-9 |
Barcode: |
9781848618374 |
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