Publisher's Synopsis
"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 a
