Lockdown

Art meets historical archive in Ellen Austin-Li's second poetry collection, Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic. These poems center around life during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic: the mysterious virus as myth & fairytale, the first-responder husband, a son in quarantine, New York City's devastating refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues. Grief, fear, and nostalgia for our relatively carefree pre-COVID lives ("oh / let us slow dance to a fast song / because we can") weaves a fabric that memorializes this international trauma. This book shows us that learning to live with fear and uncertainty uncovers the resilience we often don't know we have: "So you walk outdoors toward the blossoms / And the monster loses its hold in the trees /And you stand beneath the pink and crimson, / Its scent-feast you pray will cleanse and release /As the petals rain down in a shower."