Death and Revision: A Review of Rebecca Lehmann’s The Sweating Sickness by Brenna Julian

In the wake of a global pandemic and in a time of political and social upheaval, Rebecca Lehmann’s The Sweating Sickness is a poignant account of a woman’s struggle to reconcile with her personal trauma. The collection focuses extensively on the macabre, invoking the “ghosts” of the speaker’s past as well as the looming specter of death brought to the fore by the outbreak of COVID-19. It is also fascinated with revision, analyzing how one clarifies and recontextualizes memory with time and distance. The poems themselves represent this process of crystallization, showing how the speaker has learned to accept the pain she has experienced. As a reader, I strongly related to the collection as an exploration of womanhood in the twenty-first century.

Lehmann has authored the poetry collections Ringer, a winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and Between the Crackups. Her work has also been featured in the American Review, the Missouri Review, Threepenny Review, NPR’s The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, and Miracle Monocle. One of the poems in The Sweating Sickness, “Moses,” was first published in Issue 15 of Miracle Monocle. Lehmann hails from Wisconsin and currently teaches creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana. She is also the author of The Beheading Game, a novel forthcoming from Crown Publishing.

The Sweating Sickness is broken into three sections that follow the speaker’s journey of self-reconciliation, first introducing the “ghosts” in the speaker’s life, then addressing their personal and political implications, then finally arriving at a conclusion that is uncertain yet offers a simple truth: “Death happens and we all have to keep going.” The collection is interspersed with images of death, nature, and sexuality, as well as rich allusions to Greek mythology and to the life of Anne Boleyn, a historic victim of female oppression.

At the heart of the collection is a series of exquisitely crafted interlocking villanelles that meditate on the speaker’s memories of an abusive relationship and on the suicide of her ex-lover. Like ghosts, the villanelles vanish and reappear seemingly at random, eliciting the speaker’s attempts to banish painful memories: “I really did love you. Just once, admit it. You’re dead.” As the collection progresses, Lehmann continues to address this theme with stunning vulnerability, acknowledging the speaker’s gut-wrenching grief as well as her righteous anger. She captures in excellent detail the feminized powerlessness the speaker experiences both in the relationship itself and in the memories that continue to intrude upon her adult life.

Juxtaposed with this theme is the theme of revision, which is present in a literal sense in Lehmann’s “revision” poems. In each piece, the speaker processes memories of various scenes from her family life through a series of associations, conveying the experience of human thought without relying upon a traditional stream of consciousness style. Instead, Lehmann designs each poem to be self-reflexive, listing which images made it to each respective draft and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about how and why she arrived at the “final” draft she presents. In “Revision with Miscarriage and Man in the Moon,” the speaker catalogs her memories of an abortion:

The darkness is the first draft.

The second draft is a transvaginal

ultrasound, administered at six in the morning

and in dim light. In the third draft,

there is my husband again

I found this concept to be unique and inventive, as well as an interesting contrast to Lehmann’s more traditional villanelles. The differing styles she uses in the collection generate a natural tension that further illustrates the contradictions in the speaker’s life.

Lehmann’s decision to ground the collection in the world of the COVID-19 pandemic also proves to be masterful. She weaves together scenes from the speaker’s memories in a way that underscores the impending threats of rising death tolls, political turmoil, and the growing influence of technology. She positions the “sweating sickness”–a plague from the sixteenth century–as a historic equivalent to COVID-19, and emphasizes how both rendered the people powerless. Appropriately, she is also critical of “impotent kings” and other authority figures that seek to perpetuate the oppression of both ages. The setting is a fitting context for the speaker’s journey to accept her personal feelings of powerlessness. As a twenty-first century woman, she grapples with a system that has consistently failed to protect her—a sentiment to which I and countless others can relate.

The Sweating Sickness is a highly personal work that does not shy away from the grotesque nor from the taboos of politics. It is radically honest and courageous, inviting readers to reconcile with their own “ghosts” and rise to the challenge of voicing them. In a time when free thought is discouraged, this collection is a powerful and necessary voice of opposition. It is a read I would wholeheartedly recommend.

You may purchase your own copy of The Sweating Sickness from the University of Pittsburgh Press.