Rebecca Lehmann

Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections Ringer, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and Between the Crackups. Her writing has been featured in the American Poetry Review, the Threepenny Review, NPR’s the Slowdown, and other venues. Her debut novel, The Beheading Game, is forthcoming from Crown Publishing. Originally from Door County, Wisconsin, Lehmann teaches creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana and is the founding editor of Couplet Poetry.

The Sweating Sickness

Poems

By Rebecca Lehmann

Rebecca Lehmann’s The Sweating Sickness contains wide-ranging topics—the suicide of an abusive ex, parenting young children, fairy tales, reproductive rights, domestic violence, ghost stories, ancient myth—all set to the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both personal and political, these poems interrogate how we grieve, what it means to be a woman in post-Roe America, and how private and public ghosts can come back to haunt us. Surrealist, maximalist, formal, and with an ear to the underworld, The Sweating Sickness spins the reader into an eco-fabulist wonderland, where anything can happen, and does.

Ringer

Poems

By Rebecca Lehmann

Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann’s poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a “junk” or “sad” pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.