Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 36 pp.
$11.95 plus s&h
2007, ISBN 0-932412-52-1
ISBN+13 978-0932412-522

The poems in Fever sweat through the discontents of a love affair, a childhood, a marriage, a malfunctioning farm, the speaker’s aging father and his own illness. Dream and the gritty details of life flow together in the hallucinatory and yet grounded language of these short, sharp pieces, which form an integrated sequence with both unity and emotional range
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Air so wet breathing
by John Repp

Air so wet breathing
is work.

The long light of summer solstice
curls down vermilion in the west,

new love or promise of love or lust tempered
enough to spade this trodden earth

on her way, bearing wine & hunger
for the meal I’ve cooked—no,

a woman no
metaphor can hold,

as none can hold anyone.
May we stand fast

while fireflies brush our faces
& the eternal, unrelenting

seconds unfold.

John Repp’s recent collections of poetry include No Away(Pudding House Publications, 2007), Gratitude (Cherry Grove Collections, 2005), Time to Get Some Things Straight (March Street Press, 2005), and White Doe (Mayapple Press, 2004). A widely published poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book critic, he teaches at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, works in the Arts-in-Education Program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, leads writing workshops at Stairways Behavioral Health, Inc., and lives in Erie with his wife, the potter and visual artist Katherine Knupp, and their son, Dylan. John Repp’s home page