Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. "Wide awake and unruly, SUSPEND is saturated with acts of revelation and risk. The body can be 'laid open like a book,' but words also perform their own physiology, and the alphabet keeps time like the calling of stops on a train. Pushed ahead by narrative momentum and pulled back, suspended, by contemplation, recollection, and the dizzying potential of human will and desire, these poems possess a vibrantly lived verbal energy. In the articulation of such powerful tensions, one begins to believe that our programming can be undone, the calendar rewritten, the train diverted to new destinations"--Elizabeth Willis.
Synopsis
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
About the Author
Nancy Kuhl is the author of the books SUSPEND and THE WIFE OF THE LEFT HAND, both from Shearsman Books. Her chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared in Verse, FENCE, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, Shearsman, and other magazines. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, an independent publisher of innovative poetry, and is the Assistant Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.