Excerpted with permission from Breaking the Fever by Mary Mackey, published by Marsh Hawk Press in September 2006.

The writer: Mary Mackey is a novelist and poet and a Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches creative writing and film. Breaking the Fever is her fifth book of poetry. She also is the author of one experimental novella, Immersion, and ten novels, including A Grand Passion, Season of Shadows, and The Year the Horses Came. Her literary works have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. At present, she is co-writing film scripts with Hollywood director Ren6e De Palma.

Visit Mary online at www.marymackey.com.

About the book: “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,” says poet Jane Hirshfield.

Buy the book.