David Kirby

Americorona

Arts & Literature

“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.”