Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic

by Alice Quinn Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, Gisela Chípe, Catherine Cohen, Catherine Ho, Dani Martineck, Elisabeth Rodgers, Hillary Huber, Michael Crouch, Neil Shah, Nicole Lewis, Prentice Onayemi, Shayna Small

Overview

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 poets, from A to Z-Julia Alvarez to Matthew Zapruder-with work in between by Jericho Brown, Billy Collins, Fanny Howe, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Vijay Seshadri, and Jeffrey Yang**

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.

A portion of the advance for this book was generously donated by Alice Quinn and the poets to Chefs for America, an organization helping feed communities in need across the country during the pandemic.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Quinn’s collection covers remarkable ground . . . throughout, poets interrogate the use of their work and the limits of the imagination when reality presses in.” —Clare Bucknell, The New Yorker
 
“Timely . . . From fierce truths to dark humor, readers can share in the experience of being delighted and illuminated through this essential, urgent poetry anthology that addresses the fear, grief, and hope felt in these times.” —Poets & Writers

“Together in a Sudden Strangeness offers beautiful poems about every fact of life that’s changed in this pandemic: Grief, fear, hope, loneliness, awe, bravery, and everything in between.” —Book Riot
 
“This collection appears at the exact moment when the nuanced and profound nourishment it offers may be needed most. . . Both cathartic and challenging, Together in a Sudden Strangeness provides an early glimpse into how literary writers will discover new form and language to convey the unfolding perils of this unprecedented time.” —Emily Choate, Chapter 16
 
“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

Library Journal

★ 11/01/2020

Poets may labor weeks, months, even years to perfect the gems they give us, but a crisis as large as the current pandemic calls for immediate response—and got it. Former poetry editor at The New Yorker, Quinn gathered the 85 poems in this collection in 40 days, starting on March 27. (Though the pitch-perfect title is taken from Pablo Neruda, all the poets are American by design.) The result shows some of America's best poets snapshotting the moment to provide both immediate identification and long-term understanding. "He's working nights, learning all the ways/ a body's nerves can light & link & fail," says Suzanne Gardiner of a rookie neurologist, while John Koethe says of sheltering in place, "I hate it—but then home/ Was always a place to depart from/ Or come back to, not a state of being in itself." Elsewhere, the pandemic remains oblique, with poets waxing philosophical; observes Carl Phillips, "The dogwood brandished those pollen-laden buds/ that precede a flowering. History. What survives, or doesn't." VERDICT Diane Seuss rightly proclaims, "I don't want to find meaning in it," but Quinn's collection provides a lifeline—and food for thought. [Released as an ebook in June 2020.]

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

There is something for everyone in this timely poetry collection. Varied voices ring throughout the performances, ranging from quiet to cacophonous. The narrators are well matched to the style of each poem, moving from sassily irreverent to coolly somber. The order of the poems is also suitable, carrying the listener from joy to despair to hope and back again. Assembled over 40 days in the early spring of 2020, these poems are affecting. Some pieces may be over-the-top in their resonance, but they are all relatable to the sheltering-in-place listener. As always, poetry can offer a bit of brightness to those living in challenging times: “Two pilot lights flickering where their hearts used to be.”—Billy Collins, “Sequestration” L.B.F. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

There is something for everyone in this timely poetry collection. Varied voices ring throughout the performances, ranging from quiet to cacophonous. The narrators are well matched to the style of each poem, moving from sassily irreverent to coolly somber. The order of the poems is also suitable, carrying the listener from joy to despair to hope and back again. Assembled over 40 days in the early spring of 2020, these poems are affecting. Some pieces may be over-the-top in their resonance, but they are all relatable to the sheltering-in-place listener. As always, poetry can offer a bit of brightness to those living in challenging times: “Two pilot lights flickering where their hearts used to be.”—Billy Collins, “Sequestration” L.B.F. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173185341
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/17/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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 of the will to go on and not go on or how a certain light does a certain thing, enough of the kneeling and the rising and the looking inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough of the mother and the child and the father and the child and enough of the pointing to the world, weary and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.


Voyages
by Nathalie Handal

Shut off the music, the lights,
close the window and travel,

let your body gather voices as if it’s flowers

in an infinite garden,
thank your spirit

for the flight,
thank the earth

for the echoes and empathy,
for emptying your fears of time past,

be certain of your direction,
your heart knows the road,

the one with needles under your feet that feels less painful

than all the dying around,
the one that is made of water

where floating is a long and short breath,

and always be kind to the healing earth,

don’t be tempted by its roars which are its pains,

let the ache out,
gather all your selves

angel and bird ancestor and bark,

gather your wanderings so you can rest for a while,


then awake to help those who didn’t make it back.

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