The Fever Poems
Finishing Line Press | 2021
Praise for The Fever Poems
“These poems know a great deal about beauty and violence: ‘twenty years / was about as much good as / circling / a black eye’. Kylie Gellatly shows us what vividness is, how it lives in our shapes, our pain, our imaginary (and real) selves: ‘man taken / to be a trench / that might have been a cannon ball’. This poetry composes musics with silences. It is both a song and whisper, an erasure and exhalation. It is both a journey across us, and inward: ‘the ship was the rib of reason / [...] the ship was beginning to be an alarm / the ship was right there on the floor while this book was written.’ Herein history is envious of a dreamscape. And yet: the dream aspires to be dailiness, and fears it. Which is to say: this is a book of fevers the likes of which you feel most familiar with, yet have not seen before. Recognize yourself in them.”
— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
“Musical and deeply felt, these poems—untitled and running wild—chase down the heart. No tangible space is without the immaterial here. The Elements are resilient, and I feel pushed and pulled by them. Gellatly’s debut book is beautiful, haunted and mystical. Her poems are like ‘the strange contrast between death and dawn,’ and ‘the fool’s divine spark / forever coming loose’ in the reader's hands.”
— Bianca Stone, author of What Is Otherwise Infinite
“In Kylie Gellatly's The Fever Poems, ‘water is silk that rubs against the night’. Events are figments of the speaker’s imagination and ‘graves shape time’. Extremely contemporary in their fixation on illness, isolation, and anxiety, these poems spill down and across the page like slate off a cliffside. There is an unwavering generosity to the introspection of this speaker: through her eyes, floating ash becomes ‘hundreds of baled papers, bent up like two bears dancing.’ This is a collection that understands and beautifully, painfully relays that what we have—with each other, with the land—is ‘the last of the last.’”
— Taneum Bambrick, author of Intimacies, Received
“‘I was sore at heart,’ writes Kylie Gellatly in The Fever Poems, and the reader is invited into a sprawling, curious, visionary, deeply empathetic, epic debut. Her poems shine goldly in the space between elemental earth—salt, rock, wind, weather—and the human, conscious choice of living. With echoes of Jorie Graham and W. S. Merwin, Gellatly navigates the complexities of language, ‘a pledge made / into paper / weathered / in our hands,’ ‘choked with the monsters of parentheses'. This is a collection for our time of pandemic, uncertainty, and an urgent need for a revision of our relationship with the natural world—Gellatly recognizes the swinging pendulum of power between the earth’s force and human interference, and, without castigation, illuminates us.”
— Jenny Molberg, author of Court of No Record
“Kylie Gellatly’s The Fever Poems works like a ship, navigating the tempests of our fragile moment. The poems enact a wandering/wondering through fire and fog, investigating meaning through a naturalist’s lens, balancing an elemental pull with the fierce heat of being human. This collection is an invitation to a sensorial meditation, one where fever is less a symptom of sickness than a door to discovery.”
— Erin Adair-Hodges, author of Every Form of Ruin
Reviews
“Through repetitive assertions about both captive and liberator, the speaker acts as a ceremonial guide to her own spectrality. How does one fall apart and come back together? What does it mean to insistently personify one’s own interiority as a ship, as the poet does in a collage at the end of the book: ‘the ship was an off-year stripped bare’ and ‘the ship was beginning to be an alarm’? What feels radical about this book is its insistence that everything, even our sadness, can be externalized and mapped out into the wild, and be brought back home, too.”
— Megan Fernandes for Poetry Foundation
“There’s an atunement to the natural world, its rhythms, pains, and opportunities for transcendence. An urgency defines the collection; Gellatly […] draws our attention again and again to the limits of time: “but even / sound is an unbroken expanse / among / the greater taking — / of time and fever and nothing more.” A tension rings through these poems, too, the discomfort of being separate, the fear and alarm that comes from not knowing what will come next.”
— Nina McLaughlin for The Boston Globe
“This book is a tomb for the desperate desire to glean answers. This book is an altar for surrender, for confusion, for glittering stars and clenched jaws. It toes the line, circles the line, steps over the line, then steps back, over and over. It spirals. It changes its mind. The part of me that feels different after reading The Fever Poems is the part of me that feels seen. Not the logic-brain part. Not the ego-brain part. The part that knows grief is somatic—that it has a vibration, that it's a frequency living in the spine. The part that knows dimensions aren't cut and dry. The part that knows memory is a place the way a fish tank is a place; that memory is a sinking ship; that memory is [redacted].”
— Audrey Gidman for DIAGRAM
“Fever haunts the reader everywhere in this spiritual journey. It’s as if the readers are hallucinating—a strange feeling, as though the author is writing in a way that induces a separation of body and spirit to recreate the experience of fever on another plane.”
— Naoko Fujimoto for RHINO Poetry
“Though the pressing fear of fever resonates throughout these poems, which were written in large part during the early days of the pandemic, The Fever Poems are really about the beauty of survival—about what it means to love, and to be alive. This debut collection of found poems is not just a feat of ingenuity–it is also a beautiful work of art. These are lyric poems at their best.”
— Rebecca Valley for Drizzle Review