the fever almanac
Trade Paperback
ISBN 0-9778034-9-X
$15
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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 relevatory. Bowen's poems are about what exists 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 dissappointment, they mark an argument through
death, so that we may also experience release, sustenance, and
restitution. Philomela's tongue has finally been returned. And I, for
one, am gloriously satiated and illumined by having read this
linguistically shimmering book. Bowen's poems are dark jars lit by
phosphorescent moths.
--Simone Muench
Following Pound's adage, Kristy Bowen has cut the waste marble from the
figures of these muscular lyric poems; what remains is sculptural,
opaque, and suggestive as beach glass. Full of fever dreams and
labyrinthine tattoos, these are poems that "taste like rainstorm/ all
dampness and electricity" - poems powered by elusive images, rich
diction, and terse musicality...
--Campbell McGrath
sample poems from the fever almanac:
slice
predictions
night drive
the blue dress poems
While the predominant subjects are female, and there is a definite feminist sensibility at work here, Bowen seems more concerned with exploring the intersection of perception and language…She locates that intersection, however and deftly, in the tangible: the body with it’s delicacies of wrist, collarbone, ankle; the forces of nature, particularly, hurricane and fire; and a kind of collision of the two in car crashes and houses “ruined by water.”
Jackie White, Rhino
Here feminity is a glossary of passwords, an attempt to attach words to the restless energy of otherness.
Sarah E. Smith, Pebble Lake Review
"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. "
Kristine Ong Muslim
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