The Sweating Sickness: Poems

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.

Rebecca Lehmann is the author of Between the Crackups, winner of the Crashaw Prize. Her poems have been published in Tin House, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Boston Review, and more. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, where she is an assistant professor of English at Saint Mary’s College.