Rebecca Lehmann's The Sweating Sickness contains wide-ranging topics-the suicide of an abusive ex, parenting young children, fairy tales, reproductive rights, domestic violence, ghost stories, ancient myth-all set to the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both personal and political, these poems interrogate how we grieve, what it means to be a woman in post-Roe America, and how private and public ghosts can come back to haunt us. Surrealist, maximalist, formal, and with an ear to the underworld, The Sweating Sickness spins the reader into an eco-fabulist wonderland, where anything can happen, and does.
"Each intricate poem in The Sweating Sickness turns its faceted surface to reflect memories cut so finely each has sharpened edges. The remarkable interlocking villanelle suites and meditations on mythology and Anne Boleyn turn and churn in an acrobatic and exquisite display. And in the hazy rotation of the earth from one season to the next we observe the ache of Lehmann's autumnal poems as we're
