Review by Christina Kelly
This quietly searing collection of poems by Ann E. Wallace documents the confusion, pain and terror of the Covid pandemic, beginning when she first became severely ill in March 2020. Wallace, the 2023-24 Poet Laureate of Jersey City and Professor of English at New Jersey City University, has written an at times daily account of the three years that she and her two teenage daughters fought long COVID. In a clear and unpretentious style, she shares the struggle of recovering while also caring for suffering daughters, whose coughs are constant and dry.
The book is organized into four sections, beginning with “Days of Pressure and Fog”’ written from within the walls of a home stricken by COVID. The pattern of words on the page evokes the virus floating in air in “Airborne,” from April 2. 2020. “The War Effort” depicts women making masks at home and getting on with it, “as our leaders flounder and fail.” With skill, Wallace turns her attention to the unburied dead at the overwhelming start of the pandemic in “Math Problem” and “April Mud.” The image of a fire eater animates “If I Had a Choice.”
“This Dangerous Place,” the second section, begins on a note of tentative hope, with the short punch of “Special Delivery.” Poignantly, Wallace recounts a sweet story from her daughter’s early childhood in “Not Yet, Abby,” linking that simpler time to the more recent period of confinement. “This Virus, A Villanelle” likens the repetitive nature of the disease to the repeating lines of the poetic form.
“Sounds Will Carry,” the third section, begins on New Year’s Day, 2021, and takes us through the second year of the pandemic. In “Lying Side by Side, Each Night We Part Ways,” the speaker and a partner fight grief, nightmares and the virus. Despite it all, they “try again to prove that the nights/might not always be such torture.”
The final section of the book, “The Infinity of Hope,” glimmers with hope and perseverance. No stranger to disease—Wallace has survived ovarian cancer and lives with multiple sclerosis—she makes poetic connections, layering illness upon illness, as in “Imprints”: “oxygen tubing mimics the tether of the IV/pole I dragged through my first apartment.” In “Training Ground,” she writes: “Each decade, or sooner,/I’ve been granted a fresh chance/to master the art of illness.” The voice here is wry as well as tough.
Wallace is also the author of the 2019 book of poetry Counting by Sevens, a collection that, like this one, leaves the reader with a profound respect for her fortitude and good humor in the face of adversity.
Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of Covid’s Long Haul by Ann E. Wallace
Kelsay Books, March 12, 2024, $23 paper
ISBN 9781639805143
Christina Kelly is a poet and former magazine editor. She lives in Montclair, NJ with her three cats, one frog (and husband).