Infodemic

In a pandemic where information is withheld, warped, and weaponized, Carol Guess’s biting, funny, musical poems and prose serve as an antidote to our cultural tendency to sugar coat, our collective amnesia, our “paradigm shift fatigue.” Infodemic digs through the dark absurdities of our shared trauma–the stunted intimacies of life through masks and Twitter and Zoom–alongside “the small messes of the heart.” In the wake of illness, divorce, heartbreak and loss, when loneliness becomes a room to live in, and the barrier between life and death feels like a trap door, Guess finds communion in her queer family, in “birds live tweeting sky” and racoons watching from the pines, in ghosts crowding her kitchen, smelling of engine oil and freshly baked bread, asking: “What does it mean to be close to another person?” With a directness almost disconcerting in its sharp ring of truth, these poems will make you sit up and listen to a speaker transformed: “The fox in my chest spins / so I don’t need a heart: / not heartless / but furred and fired up.”

–Rochelle Hurt, author of The J Girls: A Reality Show