Carey Scott Wilkerson’s Cruel Fever of the Sky is like a magic carpet that sails easily between classical myth and popular culture. With touches of Symbolism, Magical Realism, and Post-Modernism, the poems are seductive. Their language is astonishingly beautiful. Whether under faerie lights strung in pepper trees or atop a Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier, magic and myth abound. With characters as unexpected as Norman Mailer, Jacques Cousteau’s pastry chef, Mayhaley Lancaster, we watch Icarus plunge time after time–into the Hudson Bay, the Potomac, the Chattahoochee River, even onto the dark side of the Moon. In spite of the miracles of salted tomatoes, fireflies, and the scent of gardenias trilling the air with their white perfume, we come to recognize our own cycles of cataclysm. We realize that for us, as for Icarus, those wings we’ve been told to spread will eventually fail us and gravity will bring us down.

Marian Carcache, Author of The Moon and the Stars and The Tongues of Men and Angels