The Sweating Sickness: Poems

Rebecca’s Lehmann’s The Sweating Sickness contains wide-ranging topics—the suicide of an abusive ex, parenting young children, fairytales, 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.

About the Author :
Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections Ringer, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and Between the Crackups. Her writing has been featured in the American Poetry Review,the Threepenny Review,NPR’s the Slowdown,and other venues. Her debut novel, The Beheading Game, is forthcoming from Crown Publishing.Originally from Door County, Wisconsin, Lehmann teaches creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana and is the founding editor of Couplet Poetry.

Review :
Lehmann draws on myths and fairy tales as touchstones in a book confronting both the COVID pandemic and the suicide of her abusive ex. A highly personal work that does not shy away from the grotesque nor from the taboos of politics. It is radically honest and courageous, inviting readers to reconcile with their own “ghosts” and rise to the challenge of voicing them. In a time when free thought is discouraged, this collection is a powerful and necessary voice of opposition. 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 confronted by urgent specters who refuse to be ignored. We witness a world attempting to move on while also seeing ourselves refuse to look away. These are breathtaking poems. The Sweating Sickness is rich with layered secrets. Rebecca Lehmann’s painstakingly unswerving vision welds together gray Midwestern autumn and searing Orphic underworld. Winking out from below—intershot with grit and fancy, anger and awe—glint hidden contrapuntals, interlinked villanelles, reconnections, exultations. This is a book of chaotic love. You can dive into it anywhere. Count on its rich waters to hold you through your explorations. Rebecca Lehmann’s new collection sings from the absolute pivot-point of Ovidian metamorphosis yet refuses to be wiped out by the prerogatives of aftermath: ‘I will not howl and burn, as I burned, I will not splinter.’ These songs of experience insist that there is a reward for survival, beyond survival: not the end of pain, but a dark-lit song that travels with it. The Sweating Sickness is a dazzling collection of poems about the suicide of an abusive ex-lover, childrearing in a pandemic, Leda, Persephone, Anne Boleyn, and so much more. Lehmann combines fierce honesty about the experience of being a woman in an unforgiving patriarchy with flawless craft that takes the reader to places of pain, betrayal, and joy. Personal history, inflected by trauma, is written in drafts, all of them equal in beauty: ‘The darkness is the first draft,’ she writes. ‘In the third draft, there’s a barn that’s been / bisected by a tornado, but still stands.’ From her villanelles to her elegies, Lehmann combines the political and the intimate to create an imaginative portrayal of how memory and the present coalesce to form a life.