On Hysteria by Nancy Kuhl

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.”

 Shearsman