Saltmarsh’s  poems - ranging in form from lyrical to prose, and topic from personal to archival - catalog the ways women have had “hysterical” lobbed at them like a threat, from the Early Modern period to now. Borne from research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC, these poems coalesce early cures and recipes from Early Modern women’s writing, with the “Sad Girl” coterie of Plath, Dickinson, Woolf, Millay, and so many others, with personal experiences of motherhood and womanhood to find action, love, and purpose in the so-called, pseudo-diagnosed “hysterical” woman. As she writes in the opening poem to this collection, “Some of us have work to do. / Places we have to, all the while dreaming, be.”