Customer Reviews

The Fever Almanac

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In Bowen's work, there is hazard to the homestead. Her poems reel you in with a southerner's hospitality, but as soon as you feel safe, the floorboards start caving in. Both devotional and dangerous, these poems are "prone to strange weather." In her book, occupied by "sadness and jazz in red dresses," an exacerbated beauty resides that is mesmerizing and revelatory. Bowen's poems are about what exist in the periphery. Beyond the lovely delicacy of stockings, rice paper, Shalimar, yellow dresses, and tortoiseshell combs, there is famine and loss, desire and rot. When reading Bowen, one experiences an unraveling sensation that sidles into the nervous system, generating the shakes. As her wonderful title indicates, this work induces fever; yet, her poems don't stop at disease and disappointment, they mark an argument through death so that we may also experience release, sustenance and restitution: Philomela's severed tongue has finally been returned. And I, for one, am satiated and illumined by having read this shimmering book. Bowen's poems are dark jars lit by phosphorescent moths.

Ms. Bowen's work only seems to get better with each new release. Her poems, which were always concerned about language and desire, now set out with a ragged new energy to quantify needs and wants--as if to pin emotions down is to make them more bearable. The paradox is that as the terrain becomes more questionable, the language becomes more precise. I never know what the next line will bring, but when it arrives, without fail I am left with a sense of completion and revelation that is as close to exactness as language allows.

The Fever Almanac is a book of wants hoarded during a period of bad weather and recklessness. In this volume, Kristy Bowen's poems are like fairy tales that espouse no morals. They read like dark secrets. The pale girls end up in the backseats of the boys in brown trucks. They brush their hair "until it hurts." The houses are never filled because they all burn down or drought

"...settles in its bones,
rattles the windows."


There is a recurring theme of rural lives being ruined by lust and discontent.

From "scarlet fever,"

....The gas station,
Tucson, where you bent me
over the sink. Later told me
your mom never touched
you unless it was a beating.

From "navigation,"

"All the roads have lost their signs."


The climactic second to the last poem, "a dialogue in blue," is my favorite piece in this collection. The seasickness is palpable. The hopelessness is forever here:

"The boats have failed us."