Unexplained Fevers
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
In Unexplained Fevers, Jeannine Hall Gailey delivers an alternate fairy-tale world where Rapunzel escapes her tower, Snow White breaks out of the glass coffin, and contemporary women escape traps of illness, body image, and expectations.
Jeannine Hall Gailey’s third book of poetry, Unexplained Fevers, is a fresh look at fairy tales through the eyes of contemporary women. Gailey frees her fairy tale heroines from their glass coffins and towers while simultaneously looking at the problems modern women encounter—from body image to drug addiction to illness—and how they find powerful ways to break free. Gailey’s trademark wit, charm, and energy fill these pages of forests and seascapes, dragons and snow queens, and the allure of the forbidden.
Pricing and Availability
Unexplained Fevers (New Binary Press, March 2013) is a softcover book that has a list price of $15 (€12); it is available from the following locations:
A digital version of Unexplained Fevers is not yet available.
Praise for Unexplained Fevers
Unexplained Fevers plucks the familiar fairy tale heroines and drops them into alternate landscapes. Unlocking them from the old stories is a way to ‘rescue the other half of [their] souls.’ And so Sleeping Beauty arrives at the emergency room, Red Riding Hood reaches the car dealership, and Rapunzel goes wandering in the desert – their journeys, re-imagined in this inventive collection of poems, produce other dangers, betrayals and nightmares, but also bring forth great surprise and wonder.”
—Rigoberto González, author of Black Blossoms
Unexplained Fevers begins with that most familiar of phrases, ‘Once upon a time,’ but the world we find inside these covers is deeply defamiliarized. Trapped by physical ills, cultural expectations, and the constraints of marriage, these heroines interrogate the world and propel themselves through it with cunning and sass. We follow, for example, Jack and Jill though a prose poem where they ‘somehow turned thirty without thunderous applause,’ after having sworn they ‘would follow each other anywhere, but anywhere turned out to be a lot like Ohio.’ At the center of these poems – urgent, mysterious, evocative – we find the great topic of all fairy tales, transformation. Read Unexplained Fevers, and be transformed.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize, Field Guide to the End of the World, and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner.
