Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague

Written during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague contemplates the dread uncertainty of our life. Describing hospitalized sufferers, she writes: "A patient, no longer struggling, is wheeled away. / Another sits up, accepts the bent straw between his lips." Likewise, her tough-minded yet always loving vision of domestic life invites us to inhabit a level of self-scrutiny that leaves us heartened even if also often troubled. And yet, despite the losses mourned throughout this book, the poet's humor and hopefulness prevail. In "Advice from a Moth" she exhorts us to "enjoy the erratic path." Deeply satisfying, Baranow's unaffected language is as clear and natural as a tumbler of spring water. She possesses a scrupulously honed poetic gift that is precious and rare.

Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University
Author, The Life of Langston Hughes (2 vols.)


Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague opens with poems about months of isolation with her spouse and college-age son during the 2020-21 pandemic. Instead of anger or boredom, her poems express tenderness with images of care and repair. They explore the natural world, paying special attention to shunned creatures: an iguana that lost its tail, insects, even a baby rat whose life she spares. In Baranow's sequence "Summer Ghazals" she asks herself about mysteries of illness, life, and death. A series of heart-thumping elegies follows soon after the ghazals. Read this wonderful book. Read all of it from "Traveling in Tiger Rain" to its final poem "Prayer," where she implores: "Let quiet hours pass without a stir / while the earth repairs."

Susan Terris
Author of Familiar Tense

"I'm there as much as here," Joan Baranow tells us, staring into a Japanese print. In richly musical and compassionate poems, Baranow reconciles our daily lives with our desirous imaginings: "most of life comes at you / while scrambling eggs in the pan." Whether writing elegies or confronting her own mortality, Baranow leans toward community for consolation and renewal, taking note of "trees sending mycorrhizal / messages underground // like teenagers vibrating / under their clothes." Literary, political, and erotic, Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague considers "What blunderous creatures we are, / holding cell phones to our heads," the poet's voice brimming with anxiety and affection.

Michael Waters
Author of CAW