Kate Daniels

Author of
Slow Fuse of the Possible (West Virginia University Press, 2022)

Kate Daniels received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She is the Edwin Mims Professor of English and author of six collections of poetry: The White Wave, The Niobe Poems, Four Testimonies, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret, Three Syllables Describing Addiction, and In the Months of My Son’s Recovery. The White Wave received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. Among her honors are the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard (now known as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study); the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; three Best American Poetry selections; the Pushcart Prize; and election to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her poems have been anthologized in more than seventy-five volumes, and have appeared individually in journals such as American Poetry Review, Critical Quarterly, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review. She edited Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, and co-edited Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly. She has a particular interest in the intersection of creative writing and the health humanities, and is an affiliate of the University of Virginia’s Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Humanities, and on the writing faculty of the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis’ New Directions program. She teaches in Vanderbilt’s Medicine, Health, and Society program, and conducts community workshops on Writing for Recovery for people whose lives have been affected by addiction.

KateDanielsPoetryAndProse.com / Represented by Madison Smartt Bell

Slow Fuse of the Possible is a poet’s narrative of a troubled psychoanalysis. It is also a commanding meditation on the powers of language, for good and for ill.

From the beginning of their time together, it is clear that the enigmatic analyst and Daniels are not a good match, yet both are determined to continue their work—the former in nearly complete silence, and the latter as best she can with the tools at her disposal: careful attention to language, deep reading, and literary imagination. Throughout, the story is filtered through the mind of Emily Dickinson, whose poetry Daniels uses as a fulcrum for the interpretation of her own experience. The book is saturated with Dickinson’s verse, and Dickinson is an increasingly haunting presence as crises emerge and the author unravels.

This compelling lyric memoir, so richly steeped in all facets of language and the literary, allows readers a glimpse into the mind of a renowned poet, revealing the dazzling and anguished connections between poetry and psychoanalysis.

Praise

“Kate Daniels has transformed a painfully failed analysis into an unlikely, original, and successful book, a compellingly personal and brave study of poetry and psychoanalysis, her interrelated passions, which she treats with a mixture of wry poignance and deep devotion. Slow Fuse is a book of burning soulfulness.”
—Edward Hirsch, author of 100 Poems to Break Your Heart

“A searching, scorching account of psyche, psychoanalysis, and life. Through Kate Daniels we appreciate the gift of poetic creation in the midst of destructive moments.”
—Michael Eigen, author of The Challenge of Being Human, The Sensitive Self, and Contact with the Depths