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.
Author City: NEW HAVEN, CT USA
Nancy Kuhl is the author of the poetry collections SUSPEND (2010) and THE WIFE OF THE LEFT HAND (20017), both from Shearsman Books, and ERICA VAN HORN: THE BOOK REMEMBERS EVERYTHING (Granary Books and Coracle Press, 2011). 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.
"This moment of historical exigency requires the invention of new forms; Kuhl's response is without irony and full of consequence. She marries the emotional depths of 'confessional' poetry with avant-garde techniques and a philosophical and syntactical insistence that the self is definitively relational. The book's tensions, the barest trace of narrative, the images, the color repertoire, the severities of the syntax, the intimations of a vanishing, of someone or something disappearing, all converge to implicate the reader in its mystery. SUSPEND is unusually important and I think it will have an immediate and widespread impact."
—Forrest Gander
"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