Opera Fever

The poems in Chelsey Minnis’s Opera Fever read like a dangerous bodice-ripper, glamorous and haunted.From the covid claustrophobia in which they were written, these poems sharply maneuver from steamy observations to gravitas (and then some groaning under the fur coats../Let’s be very hard on veils.. / Like a dark summer with too many funerals…). In movements that feel delightfully restless and darkly romantic, we readers are lucky to be caught in their quake.

Author Biography

Chelsey Minnis lives in Boulder, Colorado, and also writes screenplays under the name Merrit Schmidt. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and her books of poetry include Baby, I Don’t Care, Poemland, Bad Bad, and Zirconia. Two of her drama screenplay features placed in the semifinals in the Austin Film Festival in 2024: opera biopic Baritone and contained magical drama Autobiography of a Very Normal Person. A New York Times review for Baby, I Don’t Care called her “a provocative thinker about gender and poetry and the erotics of dislike.”