Kirjahaku

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.

In the late 1950s the notion of a 'mother poem' emerged during a confessional literary movement that freed poets to use personal, psychosexual material about intimate topics such as parents, childhood, failed marriages, children, infidelity, and mental illness. In Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother, Hannah Baker Saltmarsh argues that male poets have contributed to what we think of as the literature of motherhood — that confessional and post-confessional modes have been formative in the way male poets have grappled with the stories of their mothers and how those stories reflect on the writers and their artistic identities. Through careful readings of formative elegies and homages written by male poets of this time, Saltmarsh explores how they engaged with femininity and feminine voices in the 1950s and 60s and sheds light on the inheritance of confessional motifs of gender and language as demonstrated by postconfessional writers responding to the rich subject matter of motherhood within the contexts of history, myth, and literature. A foreword is provided by Jo Gill, professor of twentieth-century and American literature in the Department of English and associate dean for education at the University of Exeter.