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Incontinence

Charged with sensuality, ferocity, and despair, this sequence of poems follows the progress of a central character’s passionate romance. Hahn’s fevered book of human emotions becomes a powerful rumination on love, aging, and mutability in general.

"Stitching together tropes about writing and technique, as well as hunting and the loss of sexual innocence, [Hahn] marks and exploits the body with surgical precision in order to explore the peripheries of the personal lyric. She wants to take poetry to the most tangible and sensual extremes. It’s often uncomfortable, and yet as often results in a poetry of generous, piercing honesty, as if (to rewrite Bradford) it’s by the body we are ’plainly told.’"—David Baker, Poetry

"Incontinence has an enormous, almost epic sweep."—Chicago Sun-Times

Read an excerpt.


98 pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | © 1993

Phoenix Poets

Poetry

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Virgin
Princess
Directions to Where I Live
A Waiting Like This
Dialysis
Transplant
His Shoes
This Autumn
Night of the Blue Moon
Bone
Rib
Double Star
February Red
The Cold Hands of the Widow’s Husband
The Real Laws of Motion
Sex Primer, circa 1960
Obsession
The Center
Rejection
Jealousy
Last Love Songs
The Shape of Happiness
Devices for Torture
Heart, Kidney, Liver, Bone
Cremation
To Lend Some Permanence
State of Being
Enamel
Masochism
Obstruction
Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur
March
Briefcase
Bodily Fluids
Itch
Nine-Month Rhythms
Jowls
Cathedral
Hysterectomy as Metaphor
Menopause
Indian Summer
Oral Interpretation
Mania
Nerve
How High
Leaving
Half Price
Suicide
Calendar
Susan Hahn
Incontinence
The Hope
The Hemlock Society
Heart
The Soul’s Aerial View of the Burial

Awards

Society of Midland Authors: Midland Authors Award
Won

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