Customer Reviews

Prairie Fever

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It's a difficult thing to do: to reconcile the placid author's photograph on the back cover with the stark, sensual and violent poems of this book. But part of the mystery of these poems, part of the reason why Mary Biddinger's work haunts and lingers long after you'll set this volume aside, resides in that many layered juxtaposition. The poems of PRAIRIE FEVER are unlike anything I've ever read; in fact, they belong to a new genre--something I'd call, the narrative lyric from the wrong side of the tracks. Biddinger's best offer us characters who mystify, not only because of their proximity to violence, but also because of their inexplicable and nearly unwitting participation in what endangers them. In "The Edge of Town," perhaps the finest poem in this volume, bored teenage girls playing along the railroad tracks stumble upon the corpses of three men drifting downriver. When one of the men seemingly washes ashore, the girls' response isn't to flee or phone the authorities. Instead, the speaker reveals, "We used branches to push / him until the river took over. / I saw him for years after that day." In the opening to "Anklebone," the speaker reveals a desperate need for attention as she fantasizes a new identity for herself: "Some towns have the story / of a man gone mad. / Our town had the dead girl. / How I wanted to be her." Or, in "The Rookery," an abducted child inherits the cold calculation of her captors, a man and woman who give her only creamer and pretzels for breakfast: "Then one day I lay / in the dustlot by the interstate / and watched. It took hours / for the first bird to appear. / The third I trapped beneath / my hair. The third I rapped / with a stone and broke." Finally, when the speaker asks us a question in "Show Pony," a poem that details a behind-the-scenes look at the yearly county fair ("Should we be happy / that our paths crossed / so many times"), well, we don't know what to say. And while some of the poems' strange happenings remain difficult to decode or completely understand, Biddinger always fuses her taut, often neatly symmetrical lines with a sharp eye for the odd detail. There are wonderful words in here not seen in poetry often enough: "bottlebrush," "thunderheads," "coriander," "mercurorchrome." And there are moments in this book impossible to forget: one woman tells the tale of how her sister's hair caught on fire, another selling flowers and candles near the river fantasizes about a violent encounter with a man in blue corduroys and a wounded arm: "He could bleed / through my sheets," the narrator says; he could leave "ruby handprints around my neck." Many of these poems are so well-crafted, it's hard to believe this is a debut work. But it is. And it's a book that leaves us, ultimately, like the characters on the page, looking, craving for more.

Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007)

The best way to get me interested in a book of poetry is to have it blurbed by one of today's best living writers. So having an Aimee Nezhukumatathil blurb on the back of this one ("I marvel at the elegant architecture and scope of each poem," Nez writes) made it pretty much a gimme from the first time I heard about it (not coincidentally, on Nez' blog). It took me quite a while to run down a copy, so I have to say, I had it pretty built up in my head after all this anticipation. Rare is the book that can live up to that, given how much exquisite poetry I've read over the last few years. But Prairie Fever met, even exceeded, my every expectation.

This is a book of poetry that sings. Which sounds like a redundancy, when you think about it, but so much modern poetry seems to have forgotten how to sing. Biddinger belts 'em out like Lady Day with a snootful of horse:

"Riverside, selling spring peas
and bulbs. Last year's honey
wax candles. The white blouse
off my shouders, and skin
freckled from weeding, bee
chasing, falling down hills

and off cliffs. Stepping into
skunk dens, then burning
the scent out of my dress.
Selling bracelets I twisted
all winter, foot-shackled
in a sugar-beet farmer's shed,
forgetting the mending, milk,

other things with soft names."
("Man in Blue")

This is a woman who knows what she's about, knows how to go about it, and has the talent to make it all come together. It's only January, but Prairie Fever would easily have been one of my top twenty-five reads of the year had I read it during any year in this past decade; I can't imagine it won't be one in 2009. **** ½

Mary Biddinger is wonderful.

She has the ability to mix crazy images with ordinary ones in a way that finally is transcendent. Some people try to do this, and they leave me feeling lost. Maybe it's because they try to get in too much of the crazy and wild stuff, and not enough of the ordinary. Poems like that can't hold my attention. They're a lot of pyro-technics but very little heart. But Mary can write a poem about a person washing her face in a soup bowl, and you feel the madness of that, and you feel the absolute ordinarinessness of that, and the two lift you up, and for a moment you are stopped. This is the way the best poetry works for me; it stops me. It makes me consider a thing, and turn it around in my mind, over and over while time stands waiting for me to finish. And that's what Biddinger's poems do.

But these poems aren't just about mixing crazy images with ordinary ones, and stopping you so you'll look at a thing like it was all brand new for the first time.

Mary Biddinger's poems aren't just about that. There's a lot of heart in them, a lot of the human touch in them. They talk about yearning, madness, loss, joy, sadness, evil, and the way an empty prairie landscape shuts you down and won't let you breathe. They're amazing.

Her poems lift me up and put me in a place that helps me see the place I'm in and the place I left behind.

I bet that's the way Mary Biddinger feels when she writes--and her poems give me the same sense.

Don't expect any mild-mannered nature poetry about prairie wildlife here, although wildlife does appear, torn and bedraggled, birds dead on windowsills, red flowers appearing on throats. Full of dark fragmentary looks at the inner and outer violences of the bored bad girls of the prairie, poking dead bodies with sticks, rinsing their hair with beer, and making out in abandoned barns. Stark, vivid writing illuminating shadows with lightning-sharp imagery and bone-cracking emotion. From "Kicking It:" "Bite your lip/as invitation or accident...we're up/ against a brick alley wall,/ drapes swinging, late August/ so hardly any clothes to come/ off. Like a bee up the sleeve."