Because of COVID, you and I have never met in person. Yet I somehow know that this slim, intimate book of poems is the best introduction I could ever receive. It has told me so much about why I feel so drawn to you. Thank you for this gift, which I have read and re-read several times.
As a historian, I have thought a lot about the meaning of the pandemic to our individual and collective lives and, also, about how the experience of living now might be described by future historians. You have touched the pulse of the pandemic with your poems. Thank you for preserving the memories of hope, fear, regret, longing, displacement, and patient dignity for future generations.
There is so much to love about these poems. Their placement within the colonized past, the profoundly transnational present, and a future threatened by environmental crisis strikes the perfect chord. I, too, hope that we might find new strength to meet the global weight of our 21st-century lives. Thank you so much for leading the way.
Candace Goucher