Marissa Lingen’s COVID Poetry is Helping Me Cope

[jesse_the_k]

I’m a big fan of mrissa’s humane and thoughtful science fiction stories. In the last month, she’s been posting verse that helps me cope and hope.

What Remains: the COVID Checkouts captures the strange relationship we have with the books that happened to be in our house when stay-at-home started.

In the Isolation Grocery explores how, even in that temple of mundanity, every moment has changed.

COVID Spring: Underlying recognizes our individual human worth, no matter our immune-system status.

Post Apocalyptic imagines the better world we could have when the current crisis has passed.

I bet there will be more!
https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/tag/covid+poems

Comments

[oulfis]

These are really lovely! Thanks so much for sharing them. I especially like the library one.

[jesse_the_k]

It’s so spot on, I’m used to library stuff floating through on a fast river. Our libraries have taped their return slots shut, and there’s a Blu-ray I haven’t watched that’s staring at me. I hear it whispering, “you thought you could sample 10 minutes and then decide to DNF. I’m still here, MF!”

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I'm working through the 30 years of Locus Winners. There were several days I couldn't face Ursula Le Guin.

[jesse_the_k]

Because she’s no longer alive?

I just reread The Left Hand of Darkness and she captures the experience of fierce winter so well — especially since she’s a West Coastie.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

It was the short story "The Day Before the Revolution." That following up "The Death of Doctor Island" by Gene Wolfe-- these aren't the best starting points perhaps, given the situation. "Jeffty" was smoother, though I'm wondering how that would hit Steve Rogers or Bucky Barnes; presumably not reading it for the first time under the current conditions.

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah.

Time for some soothing fanfic, me thinks.

*Don't* read Tiptree's late work, The Last Flight of Doctor Ain, as it's way too on the nose.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Not sure if that's in this collection.

Even before the lockdown I sorta bounced off the Philip K. Dick I'd brought home.