Nancy Kuhl: The Wife of the Left Hand
Published 15 February 2007
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700066
In her first full-length collection of poems, The Wife of the Left Hand, the poet Nancy Kuhl explores the lyric possibilities found within the sometimes narrow space of the domestic interior, caught between the quotidian and the uncanny. In language that is by turns sensual and spare, elegant and oneiric, the images and music of this collection reveal and recast the daily ambiguities of living with others, "the fragile arrangement all blue / at the seams," and the uncertain line between the hidden and the apparent, like a "house / with its unswerving spine exposed." Nancy Kuhl’s chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, an independent publisher of innovative poetry.
"Nancy Kuhl's The Wife of the Left Hand is an amazing, subtle demonstration of the ways in which domestic containment rubs up against the chaotic rhythms of human desire. These poems bear formal witness to civility and restraint, their lines tautly elegant and sensuous as a bride, but just below is "a gash in the earth's surface" through which scraps of violence rush: 'Tangled and smothered/amid threads of icy declaration.' One feels here some of Emily Dickinson's swift reckonings with extremity, some of Plath's ruptured affect, tempered by the cool detachment of post-feminist critique. Kuhl is a master precisionist of intimate betrayal; she strikes the most profound chord: "The body, no good house, wants what it/ wants; does not listen." (Ann Lauterbach)
Read an interview with the author here, and an online review by Simon DeDeo here. Also a review in Verse here, and a more recent one in Rain Taxi here.
Download a sampler PDF of work from this book here
The cover features a painting by Joe Brainard, and was designed by Megan Mangum.
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