Hysterical Water

"Hysterical Water is a collection of fierce, funny, feminist poems, prose poems, and essays with poems woven through them, connected by threads of female "hysteria" and motherhood. Hannah Baker Saltmarsh troubles the historic pseudo-diagnostic term "hysteria" as both a constraining mode used to contain/silence women as well 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 attempts to reclaim the word "hysteria" by arguing that women poets might, in art as in life, celebrate incongruous emotional experiences; unsettling juxtaposition and surrealist free associations; selective silence and selective speech; everyday crises of feelings; meaningful "anti-communication" through odd gestures or symbols; nonsensical dream-speak/stream-of-consciousness; tragic memories of and/or encounters with insanity as well as hilarious (to everyone else but the "hysteric") brushes with insanity, to carve out a poetics of madness. Saltmarsh uses hysterical methods as an aesthetic, borrowing from the language of cure and remedy; uncontrollable emotion; excess; and cult-like obsession to delineate not only the maternal body, but also a kind of hysterical textual body. She also attempts to bring together female poets who may be labeled sentimental, private, hyperbolic, histrionic, dysfunctional; and the "hysteric patient" suffering "fits of the mother" after childbirth to carve out a new aesthetic of hysteria"-- |c Provided by publisher.