... [a] fine new work which reminds us that what’s important about Emily Dickinson is that she wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language ... Ackmann makes good use of scholarship that has long recognized her as an unconventional, formally inventive artist. The subtitle’s Ten Pivotal Moments prove a useful organizing principle ... provides with panache in a lucid narrative grounded in solid research colored by appreciative warmth ... Ackmann’s insights are unfailingly fresh and vivid, evidence of a profound personal affinity for her subject ... palpable, exciting, and accessible.
...powerful, and powerfully puzzling ... I quickly came to treasure Ackmann’s ample descriptions, her deep knowledge of the poet’s milieu ... Ackmann’s These Fevered Days peoples the poet’s world more thoroughly than do previous accounts ... Ackmann’s excursions into Emily Dickinson’s mind don’t so much distort as disappoint, after I’d come to rely on her solid research and the artful verisimilitude of her re-creations ... a book I recurrently fell in and out of love with as the hours passed, all the while fully absorbed.
... a short, highly readable telling ... Ackmann aims to convey a sense of the poet’s rich interior life and her evolution as an artist by dramatizing 10 formative moments of her life on the day each occurred. Remarkably, she pulls it off. Readers may quibble with some of her choices—beginning each day’s account with a detailed weather report, for instance, or her premise that on each of the days selected, the poet was different at 10 p.m. that night than she was at 10 a.m. in the morning. But by the end, you’ll be a believer, in part because of Ackmann’s grasp of her subject—both the mountains of scholarship on Dickinson as well as the poet’s historical and cultural milieu—and Ackmann’s own formidable gifts as a storyteller.
