Fever in Bodrum, by David Capps

Prose, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A poet-philosopher knocked out by Covid and holed up in a run-down Turkish resort lets the raw impressions of his fever dreams run rampant on the page: A midnight-roaming violinist loses his band, enthralled by visions of an adoring Hannibal. A priestess of Asclepius metamorphoses. An inchworm struggles to find its way along a flat-screen TV. Archaeological field-walking takes a wrong turn as consciousness drifts in and out.

Recovered and back in Greece, we follow the narrator into an abandoned silver mine, where the physical space confronts the psyche, interrogating its purpose while the depths of the mind mine unfold their mineral complexities: How to be at home with oneself, one’s native soil? How to understand the relationship between beauty and the divine? What is the writer’s place in the world?

David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer living in New Haven, CT. He is the author of five chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), On the Great Duration of Life (Schism Neuronics (2023), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming).