Somatic - by Ann Keniston (Paperback)

About the Book

Keniston builds upon and inhabits historical materials regarding the condition formerly known as hysteria, working with a heightened sense of the precarious, peculiar language of the body. Here the experience of absence creates the vivid sensation of presence, and the ode transforms into the elegy and the elegy into the ode. -Lee Upton

Book Synopsis

Sorrowing, searching, and uncompromising as she lifts the fabric of language to come closer to what language resists, Ann Keniston in Somatic unravels meaning, examining issues of dominance and shame and what it means to be "torn and then / remade." Keniston builds upon and inhabits historical materials regarding the condition formerly known as hysteria, working with a heightened sense of the precarious, peculiar language of the body. Here the experience of absence creates the vivid sensation of presence, and the ode transforms into the elegy and the elegy into the ode. These are startling, beautiful poems, palpable with intelligence and the long reach of their author's compassion.

--Lee Upton

Review Quotes

Utilizing startling, hairpin turns of language that unlock moments of insight and empathy, Ann Keniston creates a depth of feeling that is too honest, too singular and too hard-won to ever be sentimental. No poet I know of so effectively traces the contours of the interior. Whether she's writing about a daughter's grief or grappling with faith, there is a caged restlessness in these poems, a force of feeling held in check by the rigors of the syntax, that make them utterly compelling. Graceful, intimate, linguistically alive and bristling with intelligence, these are poems that challenge and expand your understanding of yourself. --Steve Gehrke, Michelangelo's Seizure

It's extraordinary to read gorgeous, textured poems by a scholar deeply familiar with the history of psychoanalysis. In Somatic, the wisdom and also the blindnesses of Freud offer an idiom to explore a daughter's grief. Ancient poetic forms--ode, elegy, aria-- enclose modern experiences of self-injury, anorexia, and psychic fracture, marking the transit between past and present, body and mind. Poetry, like psychoanalysis, becomes a medium of investigation, as well as lamentation and repair: "half song half / garment with / seams / exposed." This stunningly original collection is recommended not only for readers of poetry but also for students of the mind-body connection, the medical humanities, and disability studies. For those who have mourned the death of a complicated or difficult elder, Somatic is essential reading. --Jane Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions