Hysterical Water

Poems

Häftad, Engelska, 2021

559 kr

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Hysterical Water is a collection of fierce, funny, feminist poems, prose poems, and essays with poems woven through them, all connected by threads associated with female “hysteria” and motherhood. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh troubles the historic pseudodiagnostic term hysteria as both a constraining mode used to contain and silence women and as a mode that oddly freed women to behave outside the bounds of social norms.The poems in this collection question the way maternal thinking, sexuality, affect, and creativity have been dismissed as hysterical. Saltmarsh reclaims the word hysteria by arguing that women poets might, in art as in life, celebrate incongruous emotional experiences. Drawing on and reshaping an intriguing array of source materials, Saltmarsh borrows from the language of uncontrollable emotion, excess, cure, remedy, and cult-like obsession to give shape not only to the maternal body but also to a hysterical textual one. She revisits selective silence and selective speech in everyday crises of feelings, engages meaningful “anticommunication” through odd gestures and symbols, and indulges in nonsensical dream-speak, among other tactics, to carve a feminist poetics of madness out of the masculinist discourse that has located in the woman the hysteric.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2021-03-15
Mått152 x 229 x 10 mm
Vikt181 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieGeorgia Review Books
Antal sidor112
FörlagUniversity of Georgia Press
ISBN9780820359007

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Hannah Baker Saltmarsh is poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother: Contexts in Confessional and Post-Confessional Poetry. Her poetry has been published in The Yale Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Feminist Studies, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and others. Essays have appeared in Pacific Coast Philology, Forum for Modern Language Studies, American Poetry Review, and others.

Hannah Baker Saltmarsh hits the page like a whirlwind under control. Or better, given her apt title, Hysterical Water, like a tidal wave of attention, learnedness, curiosity, and that most powerful nurturance born from breaking through 'matrilinealsilence' to voice anew the powerful presence of women, traditionally ‘outside history,’ as Eavan Boland put it. Everywhere in Saltmarsh’s rich poems, their voices speak—Plath and Alice Walker, Millay and Marianne Moore—insisting on inclusion, representation, and the bountiful life-giving fact of their brilliances. This book, at once joyous and outraged, is a combination of rewriting (‘hysterical ballads’ and ‘Lactivist manifestos’ indeed) and this new poet’s sweeping original inventions. In Saltmarsh’s testifying poems, her lyric quality may be of polyvocal abundance, yet its destination is clarity. Hysterical Water takes us to the very source, ‘the center of everything.’