Prairie Fever

by Mary Biddinger

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 zebras, rhinos, marabou, goldfish, bears, and banana spiders. These poems bite and scare, ravish and delight. Prairie Fever showcases a beautiful mind, a beautiful debut. -- Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Miracle Fruit and At the Drive-in Volcano .

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published February 1, 2007

About the author

Mary Biddinger is a poet and flash fiction writer who lives in Akron, Ohio. Her novella-in-flash, The Girl with the Black Lipstick, was published by Black Lawrence Press in July 2025. She is co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (University of Akron Press, 2024). Biddinger teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program.

Reviews

[Rachel]

Mary Biddinger's poems are like small movies of plays Tennessee Williams never wrote because he wasn't a woman, but would have if he had been. The depth of characterization, the vivid settings and original language create a spell not easily shaken off. Rueful wisdom shines through many of these mini-memoir poems. A terrific read.

[Carol McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The voices haunt and enchant.

[Elizabeth J.]

One of the best books of poetry I've read this year. I know these places. This poet is a force to be reckoned with.

[Thomas Baughman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best first collections I've read. Biddinger is a poet to watch. She will have a great career.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hot damn! this is some seriously good poetry. Rich, passionate, raw. It makes me want to write again.

[Sandy Longhorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

While my focus went immediately to the prairie part of the title, it would have been better placed in the fever, for that is what this collection is...feverish. I read the poems in one long torrent of words and was nearly exhausted when I finished. These poems are tightly wound in both language and meaning. One gets the feeling that the speaker of each poem has been waiting a long time to say whatever has been kept still and silent for too long.

Woven of both first- and second-person points of view, I never felt as if I completely knew the speakers or the "you" they addressed. This instability took some getting used to, but the concision of the lines and the surprising twists of language kept me reading long enough to gain my bearings.

Another of Biddinger's strengths is her ability to weave lyric and narrative, drawing on the most powerful elements of each. Over the course of the book a story develops of the often hard life lived at the edges of a down-on-its-luck, Midwestern town. Throughout the story, the image of the train tracks recurs, almost always with the sense of our being on the wrong side of said tracks or under the trestles where dark and dangerous events occur.

A few examples:

In "Man in Blue," the speaker describes her skin as "freckled from weeding, bee / chasing, falling down hills // and off cliffs." Later she speaks of spending the winter "foot-shackled / in a sugar beet farmer's shed, / forgetting the mending, milk, // other things with soft names." The poem ends with a blood image (blood and bleeding play a large part in the entire collection): "Ruby / handprints around my neck." Chilling. Disturbing. Wonderfully wrought.

Here's an excerpt from "The Twins":

...There was
nothing left of the night,

only train cars and breath.
They could dust me for prints
and find just fingertip salt and rust.
You were a halo of consonants

in the dull ebb of my pulse.

In one of the last poems in the book, "Coyote," the speaker states, "I chose you over / all other disturbances." As a reader who tends to run from disturbances in my own life, I admire Biddinger for giving us poems that rush headlong into the vortex of a not always pastoral and beautiful prairie/world.

[Laura Desiano · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Prairie Fever you will encounter bar fights, lick whiskey from flasks, glimpse zebras and dead girls. Biddinger tells gritty, surreal stories of the rural Midwest. Somewhat of a formalist, she makes expert use of short lines, tight couplets, and Ghazals while letting loose in the occasional prose poem. As always, a thrilling read.