Opera Fever

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.”

What is poetry? Chelsey Minnis has been asking and answering this question since 2001. For the past twenty-five years, she has waged a sustained assault on the ideology of poetic sincerity—the belief that poetry becomes more truthful as it becomes more emotionally direct. Hers is one of the most exciting and ambitious contemporary literary projects that I know of. ...[H]er poetry achieves what all great poetry achieves: the creation of a world, with its own internal energy and logic, that permits nothing outside it, and feels new again upon rereading.–Jordan Castro, The Paris ReviewPrevious praise:Some poets are cutters, others are curers, showing up to every occasion like a condolence-wisher with a casserole. Chelsey Minnis is firmly in the first category. Her verse arrives well chilled. It is served with misanthropic aplomb. . . . Her poems marinate in the sort of feelings you don’t like to admit you have. There’s a tang of Nietzsche in her antisocial desires, her amorality. Minnis is a bored, fierce, literate attendee at what the poet Frederick Seidel has referred to as “life’s cotillion.”–Dwight Garner, New York Times[Minnis] has more killer lines per square-foot than Seidel even. Her subject is poetry, its awfulness, its pretensions, its ‘business’, and she arrives armed.–Sam Riviere, The QuietusIf you agree with Aristotle when he writes in the Poetics that “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” and that such mastery is “a sign of genius,” then you might also agree that Chelsey Minnis is a brilliant mastermind.–Chris Tonelli, Black OceanThe great substance of Minnis’s writing is what she can do without typical poetic accoutrement. No vivid imagery, no rhyme or meter, no real sonic resonance, just honest language stripped apart and put back together in a way that is rarely seen: honestly.–Cannoli PieMinnis excels at teetering in perfect balance between the childishly vapid and the ultimately truthful.–Elisa Gabbert, Open LettersMinnis mixes the postmodern with the nearly archaic: her exclamatory lines contain an almost troubadour-like quality in their exuberance for announcing their thoughts.–Publishers Weekly