Ciara Lightner

This week we mark the one-year anniversary of the first lockdown due to COVID-19. While this lockdown has had different impacts for different people, nevertheless it has affected us all. To foster understanding of how we all are coping through this time, here are some works that give their authors’ perspectives on the pandemic.

Written in the year preceding the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in The Unreality of Memory: And other Essays, Elisa Gabbert touches on what came to be some of the most difficult aspects of quarantine, how a pandemic comes to be, and our own questions of existence. Gabbert touches on what causes pandemics and even Dr. Anthony Fauci gives us insight into our perceptions of vaccines. Gabbbert had inclinations on a worldwide event occurring soon as she writes about how we deal with natural disasters and how we react to them. While some may feel survivor’s guilt, others may feel survivor’s thrill, elation at being alive. The author even deals with our perceptions and memories by writing about how we curate and alter our memories as we are forming them. Compelling and sometime frightening, Gabbert’s work gives us insight into just how we got to where we are.

Zadie Smith deals with growing feelings of disconnect that arise from quarantine in her latest book of essays entitled Intimations: Six Essays. Written as lockdown was at its beginning, Smith looks at her own luck in being able to leave New York just as the worst was about to hit. She acknowledges her own privilege and how it has played such a part in who has made it through the pandemic and who has not. Smith, however, does not downplay how suffering touches us all. Suffering is not mitigated by privilege, in her words; it is absolute. She discusses how her relations with her neighbors change so drastically and how it went from a community united to one merely trying to survive. Smith also writes how so many of us have the need to accomplish tasks in order to fill time, and that this inclination to be productive arises from our desire to make life meaningful. Smith’s work gives a chance to view through another’s insightful lens during this trying time.

Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic takes a different approach. Edited by Alice Quinn, the work is an anthology of poems written by different poets during the pandemic. Each poet experiences life differently, from those who can work from home without issues, to those who work in the medical field and are facing the illness head on. The works are all vulnerable and whether from famous authors such as Sharon Olds or Jericho Brown, or form those we have not had the pleasure of meeting in the literary sense, all are poignant. Many writers focus on details that would seem so minute, like saving an ant or being able to hand a loved one a cascarón, but in this present time seem to epitomize our feeling of helplessness. There is also hope, hope to see a loved one again, or visit a hometown.  It is through this hope that this volume of poems finds its strongest message.

As we all hope for this pandemic’s eventual end, let’s continue to stay safe and enjoy some new perspectives on this trying time.

Poetry! Poetry is what’s new at the A.K. Smiley Library.

Poetry has had a bit of a resurgence lately and brings with it the ability to convey ever broadening ideas within an ever-changing art form. The great thing about poetry is that it gives voices to those who may go unheard and gives us, the readers, a chance to interact with those voices. This latest batch all centralize on the theme of being an outsider, trying to find a place within a society that while requiring their presence, wants that presence to be as small as possible. It requires loyalty with invisibility. These works call into question the results of that type of society and shows that such a way of existing fails all of us.

Felon:Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts is a work concentrating on the life and experiences of a formerly incarcerated person. The work speaks to the struggles of a system that is seemingly unbalanced and unfair while striving to accept one’s own responsibility and actions. Betts uses found poetry created from case files to describe the unfairness of the bond system and how difficult it is to rejoin society once the brand of “felon” has been put upon you. Not only that, but those acquainted with the “felon” can also become ostracized from society and forced to carry the burden regardless of culpability. Immensely moving and devastating in its prose, this work questions how fair it is to continuously punish those after they have already paid their dues.

Everything Must Go: the Life and Death of an American Neighborhood by Kevin Coval, with illustrations by Langston Allston, works to show the desolation caused by the loss of a neighborhood. The idea is turned on its head by showing that the great American neighborhood is not always what we think. Pulling on his own experiences in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago before and after gentrification, Coval shows how the identity of a place is made up of so many different people and how this loss of otherness is detrimental to society as a whole. How those that create a neighborhood are often pushed out and how can that neighborhood stand without the heart that was lost. Coval acknowledges his own role in the process of gentrification and seeks to find his place between what was there before and what has resulted.

Dusk & Dust by Esteban Rodriquez, describes the life of a young boy discovering his otherness within both his family and society as a whole. The work tells the story of the child of immigrant parents who want a better life for him even at the cost of estrangement with those of his own culture. It even refers to him at one point, as the boy from “el otra lado”, or the boy from the other side.  Rodriquez sees himself as someone lost between the two while trying to reconcile both. This work captures the essence of existing in two spheres of identity but belonging to neither.

Deaf republic: Poems by Ilya Kaminsky works with the idea of society in a different way.  Working with an imaginary town, Kaminsky creates a dialogue in which a factitious town falls deaf after the murder of a deaf boy by soldiers. The work postulates what happens to a society if we refuse to listen to what one another has say. The work focuses on our lack of hearing the voices we need to hear the most and is bookended with poems which question whether or not we in our society are deaf to those who need our help.

Each of these works brings us to the question of who makes up our society and do we listen to what they have to say. Give these books a chance and just maybe we all will be a bit closer to answering that question.