reviewed on September 30, 2026
When I was in graduate school, all the cool kids read Chelsey Minnis.
I was from Ohio and “a Marxist,” so I hated her work, mistaking her self-satire for what I seem to have described at the time as a “precious self-fascination,” the poems too “ludic” and “desultory” to amount to anything other than affectation.
The cool kids were right.
I would have missed in those books—lacking, as I was, an ear for tonal range, among other shortcomings—the arch inflection of Minnis’s work, which seems always on the edge of parodying both Minnis herself and the constitutive self-seriousness of poetry writ large. When she writes in Opera Fever, for instance, that “[t]his poem means nothing to the world,” she plays not only the MFA student sobbing on her studio floor but the enfant terrible dashing poetry’s aspirations toward social and political relevance: the line is self-pitying plaint and cultural critique at the same time.
In Opera Fever—her fifth collection, and a single long-poem in sections—that tonal trenchantness filters Minnis’s depiction of a sexual relationship as mutually destructive as it is codependent, a bad domesticity that Minnis tracks from its glass-shattering dénouement through retrospective regret and back again to an uneasy détente. Refusing the intimacy of autobiography, Minnis frames the relationship as a kind of cubistic composite, abstracted as in seventeenth-century melodrama into its most defining gestures. “Darling, tell me about my wretchedness,” she writes, “And I’ll tear off one of your military buttons while I kiss you…”
More than character sketch, Opera Fever tracks in multiple senses of the term the decadence of the urban aristocracy to which its speaker belongs. As her relationship explodes, so do her class and culture, giving Opera Fever the “melancholy” of a Goethe novel—the word appears at least a dozen times in the book—and the hungover ennui of the lingerers at Gatsby’s parties. “I have all these qualities to make a decent person,” Minnis writes, “And what have I done with them?”
I go about all day pursuing jewels, fur, excitement…
But be displeased with me, I can’t help it
It binds me to you..
As here, the punctuation is inexplicably erratic in Opera Fever—so [sic]—but there seems to me something wonderfully abject in its speaker’s Marie Antoinette pose, her reveling in the erotics of the material world even as that world empties itself of meaning:
It’s a lonely party
When you run the knife along the dress strap…
And then my happiness depends upon an emerald…
So, what is death?
Equal parts breathy and breathless, Opera Fever mashes up Lana del Rey and Alex Dimitrov, its speaker’s courting of sexual danger sometimes reminiscent of noir—“I thought you were the only man who could get me out of this dump”—and sometimes of Salò: “I wanted to murmur into your guts, / The bulging pearls around you like a disembowelment… / Nothing beguiles me like you and your filth.”
By the end of Opera Fever, the pose wears, perhaps deliberately.
As it swerves between the manic and melancholic, the book sacrifices the stare for the glance, eschewing sustained thinking in favor of a dizzy, impressionistic flight from affect to affect. That is its own kind of thinking, of course, but Opera Fever might have benefited in terms of its texturing from an occasional move into analysis, even allusion. What might it look like, for instance, to bring in Shelley or Adorno or Aristotle alongside Minnis’s lament that “I don’t know what poems are for / Are they going to help us / What are poems going to do to us”? How might the countesses of Versailles counterpoint Minnis’s injunction to “powder our bruises and go dancing…”?
Recognizing that this is my own aesthetic inclination, I acknowledge too that the world of Opera Fever is intentionally restricted, feverish within its four walls. Indeed, the range of diction here is so curtailed that I thought for much of the book it was an Oulipo-esque exercise in constraint, recycling the same words from section to section. In this way, Minnis conveys all too well the fervor of domestic and economic panic, as if the opera house and its aristocrats were already all on fire.
Unfortunately, of course, they are not.