Together in a Sudden Strangeness

In this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us from the earliest days of the pandemic lockdown, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives as the pandemic continues to shape our lives

**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 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.“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 BooksALICE 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 YorkDad 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.