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.”