Hysterian by Marcella Remund

The poems in Marcella Remund’s gorgeously rending new book, Hysterian, delicately balance on the fulcrum between birth and death. These elegiac poems locate, again and again, the sorrow and feral splendor of women occupying the liminal spaces within the autumnal seasons of their lives: shapeshifting, transformational, sometimes invisible, sometimes hypervisible and monstrously powerful. Remund traverses the phantasmagorical Midway of her life through cozily domestic poems about sideshow performers, mermaids who are alternately frightening and abject, and daughters who become caretakers to their own mothers during illness and age—delivering them, like doulas, through the portal of death. Hysterian is a powerful and unforgettable book.

–Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

Marcella Remund’s Hysterian is an awakening, a rewilding, an exploration of what it means to exist in a troubled yet exquisite world. In Remund’s poems, a “ribbon / of silver shimmers its way across / the water” of a life where bodies change shape, babies are born, and mothers die. These vibrant poems are a fearless anthem to the body across time: “Make / noise. Wear the bustier. The world is your dream too,” Remund tells us. In this beautiful and necessary collection, Remund, poem by poem, teaches us how to live.

–Sara Henning, author of Burn

From its opening poem from the Midway to its final poem of release, Hysterian transverses a meditative merry-go-round where the hurdy-gurdy pulse of music and forms blurs the past, present, and future into a swirl of beloveds, muses, curses, and spells. Remund guides us into the valleys of life and death to divine how poetry is a form of memory that slows the clock to dream to remember to wake to dream. This is a collection of unparalleled hypnosis and transcendence that I already want to read again and again.

–Sandra Yannone, author of The Glass Studio and Boats for Women