We’re so excited to see that Olive Senior’s
Pandemic Poems: First Wave is now available! Here is a description, followed by recommendations by Faizal Deen, Rachel L. Mordecai, and Geoffrey Philp.
Description: 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.