The Nocturnal Factory
Nancy Kuhl
January 2008
a perfectly balanced unity of what we know and what we think we remember
James Berger
The poems in The Nocturnal Factory explore solitary nightscapes and dark-time pursuits: sleep and dreaming, insomnia and anxiety, stargazing and the ambiguities of desire. In poems populated with ghosts, shades, and figments, Nancy Kuhl navigates the “dangerous gap between sleep and waking,” and finds there “longing / made silver made manifest / in half-dark.” Kuhl investigates the tension between wish and premonition with a lyric intensity determined to “[collect] our craving, [keep] a detailed catalog of every thirst, every amazement.”
About the Author
Nancy Kuhl is the author of two books published by Shearsman, Suspend (2010) and The Wife of the Left Hand (2007); as well as two chapbooks from Ugly Duckling Presse: The Nocturnal Factory (2008) and Little Winter Theater (2011). She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Praise
This collection [is] purely about the violence of desire and the attractions, beauties, and horrors of form… Kuhl has constructed a world that’s utterly recognizable, whose conventions are understood—a world that is not one of myth, yet carries mythical implications. The result is a perfectly balanced unity of what we know and what we think we remember.
James Berger, Rain Taxi
There's a deceptive simplicity in Nancy Kuhl's work. She doesn't mess with punctuation or syntax and she has a refreshing directness of address, which is nevertheless tautly managed and never lapses into the merely conversational or mundane. I reckon this is a book with very wide appeal, and one that deserves it.
Nathan Thompson, Stripe Magazine
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Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 28 pp, 7 x 6 in
Publication Date: January 01 2008