Caitlin Grace McDonnell

Pandemic City Caitlin Grace McDonnell

"Pandemic," writes Caitlin Grace McDonnell, "fills the world like a giant select and delete." It threatens to erase self after self, melting ill, dead, dying, and affected in the sickening forge of statistic, smelting us into hard numbers, each ugly-exquisite life flattened into the grim pomp ever-receding into our pixilated scrolls. Abetted by quarantine, which is itself a necessary erasure, pandemic annihilates us twice. The statistic is an iterative unremembering. In this context of erasure, with this book in hand, there is no mistaking the humanity of the lyrical narrative. McDonnell's Pandemic City makes clear, the lyrical narrative is a curative. The emotional experience of the self in the body, writ in lived details of delight and suffering, of getting by, won't save us from Covid-19. Science must do that. But it does something as critical for our well-being. It inoculates us against erasure: "No longer can she wade through/the department emails but knows/she needs to make lists of students/who have disappeared. She asks/them to check in." - Betsy Andrews