Renée K. Nicholson’s third collection of poetry, Feverdream, lives up to its title—in turns, both feverish and dreamlike. Nicholson has always been a poet of landscapes, literal and figurative, and those familiar with her last collection Postscripts, will find that Feverdream explores familiar terrain, including the author’s complicated relationship to her home state of West Virginia, her grief over the death of her younger brother, and her experience with chronic illness. Yet, if Nicholson’s earlier poems wrestled with those difficult subjects, Feverdream embraces them, finding serenity in the harsh beauty and inescapable ambiguity of the five landscapes Nicholson chooses to traverse (Home, Body, Loss, Seasons, and Glow).
Throughout Feverdream, Nicholson leans into idiosyncrasy and dialect in a way that feels deliberate and accessible. These poems are not indulgent thought-experiments or abstract wordplay. They establish a world that feels familiar and relatable, even in its strangeness. Whether making root beer floats for her terminally ill brother at 3 a.m., polishing the expensive fountain pens inherited from her father, watching a rabid West Virginia University football fan wield a blue-and-gold voodoo doll at the local taproom, or examining her own experience with menopause through the blurred faces of the women in Johannes Vermeer’s paintings, Nicholson has a knack for making private, unassuming moments feel startling and surreal.
This is apparent whenever Nicholson describes her home in West Virginia. The speakers in Nicholson’s poems often situate themselves as both insider and outsider, prodigal daughters of a state that refuses to embrace them completely, and yet they remain steadfastly loyal to their roots. Feverdream’s opening poem, “Another Poem About West Virginia,” raises an incantation that is nearly prayer-like, as its speaker cups her dirty hands to hold rainwater:
A distant
rumble suggests another downpour.
This place I refuse to leave,
my valley. Flood. Flood.
Other poems, like “Easy, Against Easy,” address what Nicholson refers to as “the pull invisible”:
Once
I might have moved away, but the pull
invisible, like dark magic, reels me back.
Home. Such comfort, such burden. We don’t
talk about it, not talk-talk.
In her Author’s Afterword, Nicholson addresses the paradoxical nature of this relationship to place. Afterwords can be tricky—often, they serve the author’s needs more than the reader’s needs—but Nicholson’s background as a memoirist serves her well here. She is candid about her writing process, and her insights regarding her poetry’s relationship to her home and to her work in narrative medicine are fascinating. They add a layer of context that is not crucial to appreciating these poems but welcome, nonetheless:
Many [poems] are tethered to West Virginia . . . Although I grew up largely as part of the Appalachian diaspora, living elsewhere, this was the place I came to be with family and has been my home for over twenty years. . . . It’s a complicated place, full of natural beauty but also destruction of that beauty in the name of commerce and progress. I don’t know if my forbearers carried what we now call Appalachian fatalism, but it’s a phenomenon well-known in these parts.
Yet, despite any conflicted feelings about this place she can’t seem to leave, Nicholson also champions Appalachia’s natural beauty with unabashed wonder. It’s an easy trap to fall into: treating the Mountain State like a bucolic bingo board full of mamaws and paw paws and string band music, occasionally interrupted by a carefully chosen nod to mountaintop removal or oxycodone, but Nicholson avoids these clichés, offering instead an authentic depiction of her home, told in her vernacular, which never crosses the line into homespun: “I’m told / this land is old and that we are an old people with old ways but / I am not yet old.”
Feverdream is a book filled with ghosts and starlight, muddy water and peacock blues, as we are reminded in the aptly titled poem, “Regional Dialect”:
When the wind
rattles through, the haints might come. I tell them
come back when they can’t stay so long.
I’ll see them again one of these first days.
Ghosts always return, wisp-selves
floating into the dark sky
until they, too, become stars.
And in a poem like “Riverfront Timepieces”:
Think
of me in those peacock blues, setting
sun sinking into the uneven ridge, where
the night critters begin to stir. Trees twist
in the purple dusk, that muddy river pushing
nothing but tarnished pennies.
As “Home” transitions into sections about “Body” and “Loss,” Nicholson begins to draw on her experience as a health humanities practitioner and as a patient herself. Nicholson is an award-winning scholar in the field of narrative medicine—an area of practice addressed in both the foreword by Derek McCracken and in the author’s afterword where she describes working in a chemotherapy infusion clinic for two years, writing with cancer patients. Narrative medicine, we learn, is more than just feel-good therapy and positive vibes. It’s an integrated approach to healthcare that focuses on patient experience, using storytelling to enhance clinical practice and doctor-patient communication. “To be a patient is to exist in a strange duality,” Nicholson explains. “You are both who you were before diagnosis and who you become after.” As a philosophy of patient care, narrative medicine seems especially relevant in our present healthcare-industrial-complex moment where patients increasingly report feeling like a number on a chart.
Feverdream leans in to its identity as a work of narrative medicine in poems like “PicturePoemRx,” where the speaker attempts to capture the elusive healing potential of words as she watches a doctor scribble drug names onto a prescription pad:
The cryptic language of healing,
Latin mass, not unlike a poem.
I scribble to save a scrap
of something essential, but it slips
beyond us. Perhaps the attempt
is really the cure, our bit of sorcery
In other poems, like “Diagnosis Color-By-Number,” Nicholson humanizes the patient experience in crisp lines that border on ferocious:
I bare my wolf teeth, curly lipped
smile. It has been said that the ill
are wounded in body and voice.
This is true, and not. I run
the doctor and nurse into my
wilderness.
And yet, it would not be accurate to characterize Feverdream narrowly as a book about place, or illness, or loss, or any single theme. Like most successful poetry, Feverdream is broad in its appeal and, foremost, the work of a skilled artist. It does not sacrifice its artfulness in order to make a point or to grind an ax. In fact, Feverdream never shies away from posing big questions—
Can you taste a place
in its harvest?Sometimes I wake deep in the night wondering
why I saw a red-tailed hawk, or why people are cruelAren’t we
such broken-down folk?If the nightsounds
can’t rouse in me
the words to write,
I ask you, what will?
—but these poems recognize that restoration is found not in answers but in asking the unanswerable. This is never more evident than in the poem “Upon Watching North By Northwest I Am No Longer Young” where the speaker struggles to compose an adequate response to a friend who has just lost two siblings back-to-back:
I watch
Tippi Hedren run with Cary Grant across
Washington’s nose, or is it Eva Marie Saint
across Lincoln’s? All dead, along with my friend’s
siblings and my only brother, and yet some hope
glows brighter than my big screen TV, like an ember
lost from the underworld, or overworld, whatever
world exists beyond.
That “glow,” brighter than any big screen TV, is an important motif throughout Feverdream, and it is no surprise that Nicholson dedicates the last section of the book to the ethereal, ending with a series of poems that depict luminosity. As one might suspect, “Glow” is interpreted loosely as a theme. We see the celestial twinkle of a winter sky, the sparkle of cut-crystal at the chandelier-lit lobby bar, the flash of a professional photographer’s camera bulb. We also see poems dedicated to incandescent subjects like gratitude, curiosity, and possibility. In this way, Feverdream becomes more abstract in its final pages—it’s a direction the book has been moving with each passing section, the eponymous “feverdream” promised by the book’s title, a trajectory that effectively provides shape and velocity as the book approaches its conclusion. These are some of the most expansive poems in the book, including Nicholson’s final poem, “Rings of Saturn,” possibly the strongest poem in the collection (though there are many, many poems that make that a matter for debate):
Her face has whitened
the way dogs do when they age,
and I know I will lose her just as I
have lost others and how someone
might lose me. . . .I remember walking to my car
across a blustery parking lot, only a few days before,
and a kid, couldn’t have been twenty,
pointed to a brightness in the sky. “It’s not
a star, it’s Saturn,” he said. And I like to think
my old dog looked up as she rolled and saw
bright Saturn in the winter’s sky.
From start to finish, the poetry in Feverdream rightfully takes center stage, though it is worth noting that Feverdream is also a visually appealing book. The reading experience is made even more pleasurable by evocative black-and-white artwork contributed by Sally Jane Brown, which bookends each of the five sections. Brown also created the cover art, its abstract, vibrant hues perfectly chosen to summon the feverdreams found within.
Brown’s black-and-white prints sometimes call back to thematic elements in Nicholson’s writing. For instance, in the artwork following the “Loss” section of the book, we see a sketched pair of ballet shoes, a reference to the poem “Supernova,” where the speaker (presumably Nicholson who is also a former professional ballet dancer) discovers a cardboard box of her old pointe shoes, “Dirty / spent, beautiful.”
Brown’s image also eludes to one of Feverdream’s most humorous poems, the self-effacing “Midlife Run On”:
When the needle skipped
right at the part of the song
where Prince does that screech-wail
only Prince can do, I tried
to jump like I did thirty years ago
in my old dancer’s body and I didn’t
so much rise into the air as groan
Yet, the association between Nicholson’s poetry and Brown’s artwork is at its most compelling when that connection is figurative, the imagery evoking the tone and mood of the verse, making Feverdream an aesthetic book that should appeal to art lovers. That is to say, Feverdream is a book highly recommended for any reader who enjoys getting lost in visual imagery, as well as images of the mind conjured by language at once surprising and tender.
