American Carnage And Other Poems From The First 21st Century Pandemic

This is a collection of poems written during the first 21st Century Pandemic but not necessarily about the first 21st Century Pandemic.

It is more than a year since Covid-19 invaded our countries and our bodies, causing us to long for the touch of loved ones, to fight anxiety and despair, and to adjust to the stunning effects of prolonged isolation. We watched as the numbers of deaths mounted and agreed that it was the worst health crisis we’d experienced in a hundred years. We saw pictures of those we’d lost, and resisted having them treated as mere statistics. What we longed for were stories about people lost to the insidious virus, and those left behind. We wanted stories of survival, coping, finding our way to the future. We wanted stories that made us laugh, weep, empathize, share sadness, become better people ourselves. That’s because storytelling, whether sung, danced, painted, acted, or written in prose and poetry is primal. It’s how we come to understand the world around us. Stories give us wholeness and allow us to recover something vital and true in our lives. Stories, as writer Sue Monk Kidd knows, are “the life of the soul.” Telling and hearing stories of how we got through this dreadful pandemic is how we say what happened, with empathy, so that future generations will know what it was like to live in isolation for over a year, to feel afraid while trying to be brave, to cope, and even to grow because of the shared experience. The stories we tell, and the carefully crafted words we use to tell them are an act of remembrance in which our words build monuments to a time when our lives called upon us to carry on and to endure, to know what really matters, to know what to cling to and what to let go. In making much of the mundane, 53 poets share 70 poems in the anthology A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic. The poems, by diverse and award-winning writers, capture and share the collective Covid experience in which we became “gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth,” as writer May Sarton put it. They reveal that we were brave in our contemplative journey, and that we dared “to deal with our bag of fears,” as Eudora Welty said we must. The poetic expressions of such courage are healing. They soothe us and help us recover from, and recall, a transformative experience. This anthology adds to the tradition of sharing stories in well-chosen words that move and enlighten us.

Take a fresh and humorous look at the 2020 Covid 19 Pandemic year that most of us want to forget. Gary Alexander has created poems to help us remember what we lived through and how our lives were changed forever. While these light-hearted poems make us laugh, they also record how we lived - our story to pass on to future generations. Alexander also opens a door to the past -- with a look at some humorous poems written during the dark days of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. You can read with a smile the "Spanish Flu Poem of 1918" written by Joe Bogle, a black man from Louisville, Kentucky. Alexander dedicated this book to him. Today, we feel their fear, pain, and suffering, but we also share their uplifting spirit in the face of a worldwide disaster. There are striking similarities of our restricted lifestyles during our pandemic year with those living with the Spanish Flu outbreak just over one hundred years ago. Humor was a common bond, as Americans in two different centuries tried to cope with an out of control, and not fully understood, worldwide health scourge. The year 2020 was a steady progression of bad news with growing virus infections and rising death tolls. The public health guidelines relied upon a series of steps to try limit the spread. Life became isolated, ("hunkered down"), businesses, travel, leisure activities, and the wide range of our "normal" lifestyle was restricted. Learning and the workplace became "virtual" and new words became commonplace like: "zoom", and "flattening the curve" and "herd immunity". All of this was superimposed on a stress filled, very partisan year-long Presidential election. Alexander has captured it all in a collection of short, humorous, and penetrating poems with titles like: "WHY IS TOILET PAPER SO HARD TO FIND?" "LINE UP, LINE UP, IT'S FOR THE TEST!" "MY WIFE'S A BARBER" "WHO IS THIS GREAT GUY FAUCI?" "I'VE LOST MY MASK!" and many, more. They are an easy and fun read; but as you read, you

Each of Olive Senior's pandemic poems is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave. This accessible A to Z captures the zeitgeist of 2020, providing a timeline of events as the language and preoccupations changed in response to the pandemic.

Originally released digitally as "Unemployment Insurance" on international Labor Day, Brendan Joyce's full-length Love & Solidarity arrives on 9/3/2020 with reworked poems from the original release & a third section, exit strategies, which explores the summer of insurrection, mass death & love.

A comprehensive anthology of Civil War poetry by a number of noted poets including Henry David Thoreau, Julia Ward Howe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; and contains an historical timeline listing major battles and events of the war.