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Wick First Book
The Apprentice of Fever
"The Apprentice of Fever is a brilliantly corporeal first book...rooted in the day-to-day life of a man implicated in the AIDS epidemic, living on the edge, crossing, transforming and transgressing boundaries, always, always paying an extreme and active attention, which is the apotheosis of compassion, which is an act of love..." "Tayson's voice is unmistakable: direct, witty, passionate and desperate, in poems with the crucial acid to etch themselves into the reader's consciousness." --from the Introduction by Marilyn Hacker, Judge
72 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1998
15 people want to read
About the author
Richard Tayson
8 books1 followerRichard Tayson is the author of The World Underneath (The Kent State University Press, 2008) and The Apprentice of Fever (The Kent State University Press, 1998), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. His honors include Prairie Schooner’s Bernice Slote and Edward Stanley Awards, as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at The New School and the City University of New York.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 22, 2008
Such a great book. The series of poems that address a relationship changed by the presense of AIDS, is amazing, so raw, such courageous, rich poems. There are a few of them online, such as "After The Vanishing". Also, check out his brand-new book called, "The World Underneath".
December 26, 2021
I found this book at the used bookstore today and bought it on a whim. I have never heard of the volume or the author. I really enjoyed the author's style of poetry in form. The poems in parts centered mostly on his love with his partner with AIDS. It is very graphic and not for all readers. I appreciated the viewpoint and many of the poems, but at a certain point, many of the poems because variations on the same theme. There were some great lines in there though, and I will definitely revisit many of the poems.
October 7, 2010
Richard Tayson, The Apprentice of Fever (Kent State University Press, 1998)
I've had Richard Tayson's The Apprentice of Fever on my list of stuff to read for so long, I'd forgotten why I originally put it there. When I found out how difficult it was going to be to get from the library (even back when my system subscribed to Interlibrary Loan, which it no longer does), it slid down the priority queue a ways, but it stayed in the back of my mind. So when I stumbled across a copy at Half Price Books a few weeks ago, I snapped it up, and remembered why I'd put it on the list: it's Kent State, whose Wick chapbook series have been a mainstay of what's good in poetry for over a decade. At the time I discovered this, though, I had not yet encountered its sister series, the Wick First Book Poetry Prize. This will be the fourth or fifth Wick First Book Prize book I've read, and it adds fuel to my rule of thumb that while it's hard to go wrong picking up a random Wick chapbook, it's hard to go right with the First Books.
Tayson is a solid, if unremarkable, poet who can put together some fantastic images and give them excellent supporting lines. Not on a consistent basis, but enough to make a reader sit up and take notice. There are some nice shifts in tone here and there, a couple of places where Tayson will switch rhythms in mid-stride, but not in an inept way, but a planned one; this is, in general, well-crafted work with enough artistry (given that there is a distinction between “art” and “craft”, a subject which has oddly been in debate for a few decades when it comes to poetry) to make it worth reading:
“I get out of bed, watch you
chuck eggs from the window, spill
milk over the sill, toss
tonight's spareribs down the laundry
chute and the steam of your yannoh
rises. You cram king-size
garbage bags with cheeze
spread, Hungry Man
TV dinners, go for the box
of cannolis...”
(“New Food”)
It's not bad, but with a very few exceptions (as the above), the book is single-minded; poem after poem stocked with related, and sometimes identical, imagery. It gets tiresome pretty quick, no matter how well-constructed it may be. And so I end up letting it drop on the wrong side of just-about-average. **
I've had Richard Tayson's The Apprentice of Fever on my list of stuff to read for so long, I'd forgotten why I originally put it there. When I found out how difficult it was going to be to get from the library (even back when my system subscribed to Interlibrary Loan, which it no longer does), it slid down the priority queue a ways, but it stayed in the back of my mind. So when I stumbled across a copy at Half Price Books a few weeks ago, I snapped it up, and remembered why I'd put it on the list: it's Kent State, whose Wick chapbook series have been a mainstay of what's good in poetry for over a decade. At the time I discovered this, though, I had not yet encountered its sister series, the Wick First Book Poetry Prize. This will be the fourth or fifth Wick First Book Prize book I've read, and it adds fuel to my rule of thumb that while it's hard to go wrong picking up a random Wick chapbook, it's hard to go right with the First Books.
Tayson is a solid, if unremarkable, poet who can put together some fantastic images and give them excellent supporting lines. Not on a consistent basis, but enough to make a reader sit up and take notice. There are some nice shifts in tone here and there, a couple of places where Tayson will switch rhythms in mid-stride, but not in an inept way, but a planned one; this is, in general, well-crafted work with enough artistry (given that there is a distinction between “art” and “craft”, a subject which has oddly been in debate for a few decades when it comes to poetry) to make it worth reading:
“I get out of bed, watch you
chuck eggs from the window, spill
milk over the sill, toss
tonight's spareribs down the laundry
chute and the steam of your yannoh
rises. You cram king-size
garbage bags with cheeze
spread, Hungry Man
TV dinners, go for the box
of cannolis...”
(“New Food”)
It's not bad, but with a very few exceptions (as the above), the book is single-minded; poem after poem stocked with related, and sometimes identical, imagery. It gets tiresome pretty quick, no matter how well-constructed it may be. And so I end up letting it drop on the wrong side of just-about-average. **
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews