Mary Biddinger is a beguiling shape-shifter, one who suffuses her writing with
electricity and alacrity of language. I marvel at the elegant architecture and scope
of each poem. The veritable menagerie of animals that visit these pages simply
enchants: zebras, rhinos, marabou, goldfish, bears, and bananaspiders. These
poems bite and scare, ravish and delight. Prairie Fever showcases a beautiful mind,
a beautiful debut. In this stunning debut book you will enter a landscape
where girls dirt-bike uptown
in braids and gloss, a woman’s gray tabby curves into your hip, an Ohio airfield
becomes the hundred eyes of a peacock feather, and carnival tail lights are like “cherries pickled in gin and salt.” Biddinger’s distinctive voice is both mystically
beautiful and disarmingly sensual. The grit and suffering of rural America are so
beautifully rendered, the profane becomes sacred, the ordinary extraordinary. Sex, death, those liminal moments when innocence hovers at the edge of experience: all the great themes cross these pages, but not as narrative. Instead, Biddinger arrests them in her delicate gatherings of details. Flypaper, nasturtiums, and dangerous boys at the edge of town are the touchstones of her imagination. Think of Prairie Fever as a Sally Mann photograph in deftly chiseled verses. Or think of the poems as out-takes from a small-town gothic movie Jim Jarmusch should have made. It's as if Biddinger re-spliced them into a dreamy collage starring a cross between To Kill a Mockingbird's Scout Finch and Nabokov's Lolita. You get the idea: delicate, bruised, a little wayward. |
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Other Reviews: "Drift" from Prairie Fever featured on Verse Daily Mary discusses Prairie Fever as part of Kate Greenstreet's First Book Interview series |
