This Passing Fever

by Melanie Faith

The time: 1918. The U.S. is both prosperous and at war. An influenza epidemic, often known by the misnomer Spanish Flu or La Grippe, is spreading throughout the world. The 1918 flu is different in that it tends to strike down otherwise-healthy adults in their prime, ages 18-40, compared to later outbreaks that target children and the elderly. The poems in This Passing Fever explore how everyday people within small-town America meet sweeping, unexpected illness with hope, fear, charity, and grief. Incorporating details both fictional and fact, including a historically-accurate jump-rope rhyme within the first poem in this collection, “Rope,” protagonists such as Alma Donovan-Smith depict the fears, joys, and trials of familial, personal, and community life during a time of crisis. Much like Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, these poems will encourage those interested in the history of the time period and the potential of character development within poetry.

Genres: Poetry, History

78 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 3, 2017

About the author

Melanie Faith likes to wear many professional hats, including as a poet, photographer, prose writer, professor, editor, and tutor.

She enjoys old-school film cameras, quotes, that new-shoes feeling, thoughtfulness, ASMR videos about maps and books, and spending time with fellow writers and her nieces

Her latest narrative poetry collection, Does It Look Like Her? (February 2024), follows Alix, a forty-something artist, new educator, and mom, and the famous painting she sits for. The poems explore what it means to pursue artistic passion, the personal meanings we overlay onto art and artists in a society not conducive to art-making, ambition at midlife, and the indirect route to so-called overnight success.

Her latest books on writing craft (published by Vine Leaves Press in 2022) are: From Promising to Published: A Multi-Genre, Insider’s Guide to the Publication Process, Writing It Real: Crafting a Reference Book that Sells, and Writing It Real: Creating an Online Creative-Writing Class for Fun and Profit. Check out her other inspired books on creativity: In a Flash!, Poetry Power, and Photography for Writers (also Vine Leaves Press).

Her poetry has been set to opera, and her fine-arts photography has appeared on book covers and in juried shows.

Reviews

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


HOGS: A YOU-ARE-THERE POEM, 1904-1918

“It likely started at a pig farm in northern Kansas, jumping adeptly from hogs to humans as influenza is known to do.” —Kristin A. Watkins, MBA, Holland Regenerative Medicine Program, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, Nebraska

Picture
an earth-tremble of grunts,
assembled willy-nilly, the porcine
shoving snouts out of the way
for the best trough spots,
which are whichever spots you’ve just
spilled the slop from a dented pail.

From ages 4 to 18
you wake on the bottom bunk,
your brothers elbow and poke you
to pull your boots on in the dark.
You’re already in the barn
when the roosters crow from fence-posts;
you’ve already put in almost two hours
work before your walk to school.

Before breakfast
you stand ankle-deep in the pen
emptying corn mush, pigs jostling into you.
You call: “Step aside now, step aside,”
to which one you cannot say,
as their breath steam-clouds and hangs
in chill morning air. They breathe out
as you breathe in.


A HAMMER AND A SPARE AND A SACK OF SIXPENNY NAILS

Alma Donovan’s dad, Philip

Father Costas asked a bunch of us.
Tom Heneckle, Russell Moses, and I
were one of four or five crews
that went down there to the lumberyard
every night for weeks. I took
a hammer and a spare
and a sack of sixpenny nails.

We were given the scraps—oak and ash
with hard knots big as a fist or thick splinters.
We went down there after our mill shifts.
It got pitch dark by five. We had to hurry.
Many nights it snowed.
The iron cold in our nostrils,
our hammers driving nail heads in—
next, next, next until enough

boxes were finished. We loaded them
onto a parish wagon that Tom took over.
He told me once: the bodies in the mortuary
were stacked three abreast in the hallway.
Then laid to rest quick, without services.

What got me were the tiny ones—
no bigger than a doll’s bed
like my three daughters used.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 1918 Influenza epidemic (often called the Spanish flu) is considered one the deadliest epidemics in world history, (50 - 100 million people died worldwide) yet its seriousness has been lost in history. Melanie Faith's newest collection of poetry, This Passing Fever, is a thoughtful exploration of the heartbreak of this deadly disease. Told through persona voices of those who witnessed (and thus survived) the outbreak, This Passing Fever, will stay with any reader long after he or she is done with the book.

[Terri McCord · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melanie Faith's beautiful diction and her artful use of poetic tropes immerses the reader in a haunting world that makes us want to reach through the pages and save these well-realized characters of 1918. Each careful, well-placed image brings alive what matters. Imagine "a parting picture/from an uncle's camera," "strawberry preserves and toast," "a dulcet setting sun."

Intertwined with metaphorical, imagistic poems are narratives that speak with strong, wise voices from the townspeople: "I tell you, though:/when that influenza swept through,/you couldn't find no community left."

This Passing Fever: 1918 Influenza Poems is a prescient telling of the devastation an epidemic can leave in its wake and how fragile and tender humanity is.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through tears and sighs and a pause or two to take a deep breath before continuing, I read this amazing poetry collection cover to cover in one sitting The initial poem snatched me from the present and immediately immersed me in small-town life during the 1918 influenza pandemic. This wasn't so much a history lesson, it was a journey through the eyes of those who experienced the helplessness and horror of losing neighbors, friends, teachers, parents, siblings - and the strength demanded of them to hold onto their hope and faith. I wasn't just the reader, I was in Kansas in 1918 with the folks in these poems. I could see, hear, touch, taste, and feel what it was like to live through the epidemic. That's the power and precision of Melanie Faith's writing. Read this poetry collection and share it!

[Kwami Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather than a reeling off of facts, Melanie faith's poetry collection, "This Passing Fever" perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the 1918 flu pandemic. We get to survey the world through the eyes of American towns people. Each with their own unique perspective. Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, grandsons, shopkeepers, nurses soldiers, etc. We see their sadness, their fear, their faith and their humanity. Themes of war are present (ww1 + flu as an invisible enemy). The proclivity of influenza to jump from animals to humans is discussed. ( a lesson in our eating habits perhaps?)

From the viral symptoms to societal behaviour, it is remarkable how much the account of the Spanish flu mirrors what we have come to see today with covid 19. Rating: Excellent

[Antonia Albany · Rating 5 out of 5]

The characters in this book sat next to me as they told their moving stories of the 1918 influenza via Ms. Faith's poems. I felt their pain, bewilderment, and sorrow. And I was captivated by all of them. It's not easy to tell this historic time in poems, but Melanie has done an outstanding job of drawing in the reader and keeping them in the story until the end. This creative writer has written a book for our time. I wonder, after having read it during the current COVID-19 pandemic, if she'll write of these times in a similar fashion. I hope to get to read that book if she does.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting, riding to work on the train. It really transported me there and I learned a lot about the virus and the people it affected. It's heartbreaking poetry, but I'm in love. I'm looking forward to reading more by Melanie Faith.