Review of From the Fever-World, Susan S. Williams

Review | From the Fever-World, by Jehanne Dubrow

The first and final poems of the book offer other nightmares—or hallucinations brought on by fever—of a house of death. In the opening poem, Ida warns, “Avoid the red house in the forest,” its “rooms crowded with ghosts.” In the last she announces, “I am returned, to the fever-world— / my rooms made empty now.” But the house this time has become the scene of the most terrible plague of Exodus, from which the Hebrews are meant to be spared. Ida, however, discovers “there never was a blood / to paint the lintel, the Angel / entering through every door / of me.” Her firstborn has not been passed over, and she herself, presumably dying, is lost in “all the falling down / that follows after.”