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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
