Megan Ross’ Debut Poetry Collection, Milk Fever, Is Here

South African writer Megan Ross, recipient of the inaugural Brittle Paper Award for Fiction for her powerfully lyrical short story “Farang,” has a debut collection of poetry called Milk Fever. The collection is published by Cape Town-based publishers, Uhlanga Press. The beautiful cover collage is by Taiwan-based artist Leora Joy.

Here is a description of Milk Fever:

An extraordinary debut, Megan Ross writes the uneasy truths about unexpected motherhood and all its emotional detritus. In deftly and experimentally navigating the angst, joy and self-reckoning that comes with the choices and misadventures of young womanhood, this is a collection that brings together the evocative with the provocative, and the feminist with the personal, in a bold and startling poetic style.

Hallucinatory, image-wet, and navigating the eternal tides of spirit and body, Milk Fever is a chimeric dreamscape in which a woman reconfigures, remembers and rebirths herself.

Against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement and the general turn towards feminism as a way of grappling with questions of what it means to be a woman in today’s world, this kind of work is no doubt significant. In her 2018 Stockholm speech, Chimamanda Adichie called for storytelling as one way to navigate the complexities of a women’s experiences today. The poems in Ross’ collection are doing just that. They are creating powerful points of connection between the personal and the political, the angst-ridden and the joyful, and, thus providing clarity in a time when everything seems so topsy-turvy.

Before winning the Brittle Paper Award for Fiction, Megan Ross’s story “Farang” was a runner-up for the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize and the 2017 National Arts Festival Short Sharp Stories Award.

Ross has already begun a book tour for Milk Fever:

In Cape Town, on 14 May, she did a launch at Book Lounge.

On 18 May, she did a reading at Zeitz MOCAA with poet Francine Simon, which approached the work of Kenyan artist, Wangechi Mutu through their respective works.

On 19 May, she was in conversation with Irish poet Joseph Woods at Franschoek Literary Festival, an event themed “Women Writing as an Act of Resistance.”

Congratulations to Megan Ross.

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HOW TO GET YOUR COPY OF MILK FEVER (R180.00):

1) IN SOUTH AFRICA:
– Exclusive Books
– Bargain Books
– Independent book stores (Book Lounge Kalk Bay Books Love Books etc)