The Fever Poems

The sensory revolution of Kylie Gellatly’s The Fever Poems stretches across the white space of the page in poems that explore what the speaker might call a “normal agony” that blows up and condenses through shifting images of gale winds, bullets, and alabaster. I found myself wondering what counted as a surface or subject, both on the page and in the nebulous worlds enacted through the poems. The imagery is tirelessly amorphous: the poet writes of "floating specks," of "a deep sea wooing in low tones," and of "pleasant suns" that rise "magnetically."

Nothing is quite contained, the phenomena ring out with subperceptual forces of the world (dust, submerged oceanic song, magnetism) that suddenly become visible with their causality in plain view. But the poems are neither soft nor quiet just because they are sensory, there is a self-rousing activation of the speaker throughout the collection:

I lay a captive in chains
I stormed the ramparts
I dashed to the very spur
I bided my time and the coup de grace
I had nothing to do with the shipwreck
I would bring back the news
and my respects 

Through such 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.