Poetry. 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...

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...

Poetry. "If an echo is a 'pining into sound, ' Kuhl rewrites it in a way that gives pining uncommon agency this is not a 'pining away' but a pining toward, a pining into. It's vigorous; it's vivid, but nonetheless graceful in its manipulation of the layers and columns of the human psyche. Rangy in her syntax, tight in her rhythms and sounds, Kuhl exposes the intricacies of daily acts, events and sights, slowly extending them out beyond their own boundaries to where ghosts whisper into open mouths and the 'past is wild but almost / over.' This exceptional poet hits a new height with each new...