Pandemic Almanac
by Rachel Hadas
In thirty-six poems written between February 2020 and July 2021, distinguished poet Rachel Hadas captures moments of her personal version of the first year and a half of the pandemic. With candor and elegance, these poems, which vary in form and mood, limn both the inner and outer landscapes of what the poet calls shared privacy. Like countless other people (and not only writers), Hadas has kept going partly by keeping track, striving to balance “our mortal mix of hope and love and dread.” In the process, she has assembled a strong new collection.
Praise for Pandemic Almanac
In our precarious moment of global contagion and shifting technologies, Rachel Hadas has found a lyric measure to mark the monumentality of our age and its accompanying stillness that occasions a gorgeous chronicling of the seasons, small natural wonders, humane acts of gift-giving, but also generative reminiscences that find the poet "pawing through time like an eager lover." With an easeful artfulness, at every turn, Hadas' poems are profoundly meditative and buoyant in their “graceful sweeps."
—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
Pandemic Almanac is the story of no story, of our lives in a seemingly endless parenthesis. We’re ghosts “caught between the living and the dead,” both fearing and yearning for contact. It’s strange, Rachel Hadas says, but also strangely familiar, as if all along “we knew, but didn’t know we knew.” The pandemic mutes the cacophony and multiplicity of life but makes her feel even more strongly its essentials. At once light-hearted and grave, and silvery in their grace, these poems show us our world as it has never been, and as it has always been.
—James Richardson, author of For Now
This collection of poems chronicles a year and a half of the Coronavirus pandemic with Rachel Hadas’s signature intelligence, perception, humor and depth. From constraints of pandemic living to national issues to her teaching life or at home in New York and Vermont, Hadas brings a light touch to serious ruminations. Encompassing uncertainty and hope, love and dread, ancestors and present company, what a spacious moment Rachel Hadas has illuminated for us all.
—Reeve Lindbergh, author of Two Lives
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ISBN: 978-1-933974-45-3/ $16 each
© Ragged Sky Press