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.”

Nancy Kuhl’s first full-length collection of poems, The Wife of the Left Hand, was published in 2007 by Shearsman Books. Co-editor of Phylum Press, she is Curator for Poetry of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

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About Nancy Kuhl’s The Wife of the Left Hand:

“ 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, Stride Magazine