Hysterical Water

Hannah Baker Saltmarsh is poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother: Contexts in Confessional and Post-Confessional Poetry. Her poetry has been published in The Yale Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Feminist Studies, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and others. Essays have appeared in Pacific Coast Philology, Forum for Modern Language Studies, American Poetry Review, and others.

Hannah Baker Saltmarsh hits the page like a whirlwind under control. Or better, given her apt title, Hysterical Water, like a tidal wave of attention, learnedness, curiosity, and that most powerful nurturance born from breaking through 'matrilinealsilence' to voice anew the powerful presence of women, traditionally ‘outside history,’ as Eavan Boland put it. Everywhere in Saltmarsh’s rich poems, their voices speak—Plath and Alice Walker, Millay and Marianne Moore—insisting on inclusion, representation, and the bountiful life-giving fact of their brilliances. This book, at once joyous and outraged, is a combination of rewriting (‘hysterical ballads’ and ‘Lactivist manifestos’ indeed) and this new poet’s sweeping original inventions. In Saltmarsh’s testifying poems, her lyric quality may be of polyvocal abundance, yet its destination is clarity. Hysterical Water takes us to the very source, ‘the center of everything.’