“The poetry in Breaking the Fever offers truths both personal & political, visions both actual and imaginatively broad. Ranging in setting from her childhood Indianapolis to a Brazilian favela, in subject from ecological tragedy to marital passion to the thoughts of a thoroughly contemporary Leda, Mary Mackey’s crisp-edged perceptions are set down in this new collection of poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye.”—Jane Hirshfield

“Most poets seem to write poetry with the will, relentlessly suppressing every part of themselves that isn’t ecstatic. Mary Mackey writes as a whole person—mind and senses—and the poems are marvelous.” —Dennis Nurkse

"I expected wit, humor, imaginative leaps, lyrical and sensuous language and the kind of wisdom that can only come from a poet who has put in some time as a keen observer on and of this planet. Breaking the Fever does not disappoint."—Poetry Now

Mary Mackey's stunning collection opens with the fierce, hallucinatory music of her"fever children." Poem after poem extends and develops the themes of surreal delerium and psychic transcendence, Mackey's hallucinatory troping continually deconstructing rational consciousness.... not only passionately transcendent but dangerously corrosive. —Small Press Review

ISBN 0-9724785-8-2 $15.00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Mackey was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. After receiving a B.A. from Harvard, she attended the University of Michigan where she received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. She is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including “The Dear Dance of Eros;” one experimental novella, “Immersion,” and eleven novels, including “A Grand Passion,” “Season of Shadows,” “The Year the Horses Came, “ and “The Notorious Mrs. Winston” (a novel set during the American Civil War which will be published by Berkley Books in 2007). Her literary works have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. Mackey has lectured at Harvard and the Smithsonian. She is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches creative writing and film. A member of the Writers Guild of America, west, she wrote the screenplay for the award-winning feature “Silence.” At present, she is co-writing film scripts with Hollywood director Renée De Palma. More information about her can be found at www.marymackey.com.