Pandemic Poems

Early in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Olive Senior began posting her series of Pandemic Poems on social media. The project was a way of bearing witness to the strangeness of it all and forging a reassuring connection with readers. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic - an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our historic moment. By presenting these words and phrases in sequence, Senior offers a timeline of the way events unfolded and how the language and preoccupations kept changing in response. In this accessible collection, Senior captures the zeitgeist of 2020.&quote;Generations to come will read these poems and chart the shifts we've been making or not making as a global community linked by a singular virus bearing multiple challenges. We've needed these poems, and we continue to ever more.&quote;-Faizal Deen, author of The Greatest Films&quote;Olive Senior's Pandemic Poems invite, seduce and require us to think and feel in new ways about the intersecting crises of this terrible year. I was moved to laughter, to weeping, and to silence by these poems. They are essential reading.&quote;-Rachel L. Mordecai, author of Citizenship under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture&quote;In Pandemic Poems, Olive Senior captures the sense of dread that has affected us since the virus has crept into our lives. . . . Senior transforms seemingly mundane events into meditations on mortality. Pandemic Poems offers a much-needed respite from the deluge of data that surrounds us and provides moments to pause and, perhaps, find peace.&quote;-Geoffrey Philp, author of Garvey's Ghost