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

Recent scholarly trends and controversies in Gertrude Stein scholarship have focused on her politics and her friendships as well as on Stein the collector, the celebrity, the visual icon. Clearly, these recent examinations not only deepen our understanding of Stein but also attest to her staying power. Yet Stein's writing itself too often remains secondary. The central premise of Primary Stein is that an extraordinary amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein's work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished. The essays in Primary Stein draw on recent interdisciplinary examinations, using cultural and historical contexts to enrich and complicate how we might read, understand, and teach Stein's writing. Following Stein's own efforts throughout her lifetime to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, these innovative essays turn the lens back to a wide range of her texts, including novels, plays, lectures and poetry. Each essay takes Stein's primary works as its core interpretive focus, returning scholarly conversations to the challenges and pleasures of working with Stein's texts.

"If an echo is a 'pining into sound,' Kuhl rewrites it in a way that gives pining uncommon agency - this is not a 'pining away' but a pining toward, a pining into. It's vigorous; it's vivid, but nonetheless graceful in its manipulation of the layers and columns of the human psyche. Rangy in her syntax, tight in her rhythms and sounds, Kuhl exposes the intricacies of daily acts, events and sights, slowly extending them out beyond their own boundaries to where ghosts whisper into open mouths and the 'past is wild but almost / over.' This exceptional poet hits a new height with each new book, and the view from this one is great!" - Cole Swensen

Recent scholarly trends and controversies in Gertrude Stein scholarship have focused on her politics and her friendships as well as on Stein the collector, the celebrity, the visual icon. Clearly, these recent examinations not only deepen our understanding of Stein but also attest to her staying power. Yet Stein s writing itself too often remains secondary. The central premise of Primary Stein is that an extraordinary amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein s work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished. The essays in Primary Stein draw on recent interdisciplinary examinations, using cultural and historical contexts to enrich and complicate how we might read, understand, and teach Stein s writing. Following Stein s own efforts throughout her lifetime to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, these innovative essays turn the lens back to a wide range of her texts, including novels, plays, lectures and poetry. Each essay takes Stein s primary works as its core interpretive focus, returning scholarly conversations to the challenges and pleasures of working with Stein s texts."

'Taking place within a lunar month, and likewise, within a menstrual cycle, "Suspend" is deeply concerned with pregnancy, sexual desire, self and self-doubled and doubling. In this collection of poems, fragments, prose, askew children's verse, and insomniac's jottings, Kuhl privileges the difficult inquiry of the whole book over the jewel-like quality of her 'finished verse'. The work often feels manic, written down as quickly as the unconscious gives its fragments of memories connected to an insomniac's roving/raving mind; then, in extraordinary counterpoint, the poems assemble the urgent fractures of the diary-like notes into verse of remarkable formal beauty and integrity' - (Dan Beachy-Quick).

Poetry. In her first full-length collection of poems, THE WIFE OF THE LEFT HAND, the poet Nancy Kuhl explores the lyric possibilities found within the sometimes narrow space of the domestic interior, caught between the quotidian and the uncanny. In language that is by turns sensual and spare, elegant and oneiric, the images and music of this collection reveal and recast the daily ambiguities of living with others, "the fragile arrangement all blue / at the seams," and the uncertain line between the hidden and the apparent, like a "house / with its unswerving spine exposed." Nancy Kuhl's chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, an independent publisher of innovative poetry.