Together in a Sudden Strangeness

Zusatztext Both cathartic and challenging . . . This collection appears at the exact moment when the nuanced and profound nourishment it offers may be needed most . . . The diversity of voices represented by these poets reflects the endless variety of circumstances under which people have had to face this worldwide event . . . In these poems, we experience the enduring capacity of the human imagination to locate meaning, beauty, and witnesseven in the direst circumstances. Emily Choate, Chapter 16 One of the best books of poetry of the year . . . Quinn has accomplished something dizzying here: arranged a stellar cast of poets, some with [Diane] Seuss's satirical eye, others with a fresh deep down sentiment. It is what all great anthologies must be: comprehensive, contradictory, stirring. Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions This collection of poems helps to reiterate our vulnerability and capacity of resilience and finding beauty and hope in the world around us in the direst circumstances. The day will come when reading these words again will remind us how it was living through this surreal period and that together we have survived it. Marco De Ambrogi, The Lancet A welcome collection of creative healing. Andrew Jarvis, New York Journal of Books Informationen zum Autor ALICE QUINN, the executive director of the Poetry Society of America for eighteen years, was also the poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007 and an editor at Alfred A. Knopf for more than ten years prior to that. She teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts and is the editor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop's writings, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments , as well as a forthcoming book of Bishop's journals. She lives in New York City and Millerton, New York Klappentext In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives. As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits. Zusammenfassung In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives. One of the best books of poetry of the year . . . Quinn has accomplished something dizzying here: arranged a stellar cast of poets . . . It is what all anthologies must be: comprehensive, contradictory, stirring. The Millions **Featuring 107 poet...

Autorentext
ALICE QUINN, the executive director of the Poetry Society of America for eighteen years, was also the poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007 and an editor at Alfred A. Knopf for more than ten years prior to that. She teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and is the editor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop’s writings, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, as well as a forthcoming book of Bishop’s journals. She lives in New York City and Millerton, New York

Klappentext

In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives.

As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality. In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement. From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits.

Leseprobe
Dad Poem
by Joshua Bennett

No visitors allowed
is what the masked woman behind
the desk says only seconds
after me and your mother
arrive for the ultrasound. But I’m the father,
I explain, like it means something
defensible. She looks at me as if
I’ve just confessed to being a minotaur
in human disguise. Repeats the line. Caught
in the space between astonishment
& rage, we hold hands a minute
or so more, imagining you a final time before our rushed goodbye,
your mother vanishing
down the corridor
to call forth a veiled vision
of you through glowing white
machines. One she will bring
to me later on, printed and slight
-ly wrinkled at its edges,
this secondhand sight
of you almost unbearable
both for its beauty and
necessary deferral.
What can I be to you now,
smallest one, across the expanse
of category & world catastrophe,
what love persists
in a time without touch

Corona Diary
By Cornelius Eady

These days, you want the poem to be
A mask, soft veil between what floats
Invisible, but known in the air.
You’ve just read that there’s a singer
You love who might be breathing their last,
And wish the poem could travel,
Unintrusive, as poems do from
The page to the brain, a fan’s medicine.
Those of us who are lucky enough
To stay indoors with a salary count the days
By press conference. For others, there is
Always the dog and the park, the park
And the dog. A relative calls; how you doin’?
(Are you a ghost?). The buds emerge, on time,
For their brief duty. The poem longs to be a filter, but
In floats Spring’s insistence. We wait.

The End of Poetry
By Ada Limón

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough o…