Americorona
Poems about the Pandemic
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2021
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Publisher's Description
The poems in Americorona track the history of COVID-19 in the US from late 2019 to early 2021--how the pandemic affects America medically, economically, spiritually, and psychologically. There are three types of poems in seven sections in Americorona. Leading each section are poems about other historical pandemics (cholera, Black Death, polio, Irish Potato Famine, Pharaoh's plagues, etc.) that foreshadow or parallel the tragic events ushered in by COVID-19. The majority of poems, however, are about COVID-19 tragedies--how the pandemic started, how it impacts children and minorities, how it resulted in hunger and increased discrimination, how it brings out naysayers, how the medical community is dealing with the pandemic. Interspersed among COVID-19 and historical poems are experimental ones on such topics as the "memory of breathing" or the "exhaustion of monotony" during the pandemic.
Endorsements (3)
“Philip Kolin’s Americorona captures the essence of the pandemic with heartfelt compassion and careful attention to medical, economic, and social details. His poems share in the tragedy as well as the victories of health-care providers, their patients, and their families. Kolin’s poems reflect the fragility and struggles of the human condition during the pandemic by insightfully focusing on what we must do not only to survive but to conquer fear and uncertainty.”
“Philip Kolin looks at the world through plague-colored lenses, but he starts with the Black Death that raged through fourteenth-century Europe and other historical pandemics to show how they relate to the COVID virus. And why not? Circumstances may change, but human nature doesn’t. We always learn from adversity—we always remember, as one of his poems says, ‘when the world was in love with faces.’ The poems in Americorona are smart, compassionate, and aware in a way that brings those qualities out in anyone who reads them.”
“In Americorona, Philip Kolin demonstrates he is both a disciple of history and a prophet regarding the COVID pandemic. His powerful collection touches upon almost every feeling we as Americans have had about COVID, including hope and salvation, which Kolin deftly weaves into so many of these poems. Each of the seven sections into which the collection is divided begins with a poem about a relevant historical pandemic that Kolin brings to life with glowing detail. . . . I am ready to reread Americorona and recommend it to anyone who has suffered because of the COVID pandemic, which, I think, is just about all of us.”
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