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.
As the global pandemic continues more acute, and more egregiously mishandled, in some locations than others I can only say that I am experiencing a profound exhaustion, and I imagine many of
sx salon’s readers are as well. It is beyond me to behave in a business-as-usual manner even for the duration of this introduction, and I am not going to try. Instead I will invite you, our readers, to consider whether all the forces political cynicism, a profit-over-people orientation, scientific illiteracy and denialism, individualism run amok, and white supremacy that underpin catastrophically failed pandemic responses in some places are also responsible for creating the climate crisis to which the Caribbean is particularly vulnerable; the record-breaking 2020 hurricane season is yet another data point indicating the acceleration of that crisis. If COVID-19 is a harbinger of our climate resilience or lack thereof, the challenges that lie before us are daunting, to say the very least.