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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.
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