the fever almanac
 Ghost Road Press, 2006 Trade Paperback ISBN 0-9778034-9-X $15 click here to order book (out of print/signed/limited quantity available) view free pdf 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
reviews
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 |