Common Disaster: Poems
Autor M. Cynthia Cheungen Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 noi 2025
As a front-line physician, M. Cynthia Cheung started writing poetry during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her remarkable debut collection, Common Disaster, chronicles these experiences. Confronting not just the coronavirus but also war crimes and the death of loved ones, Cheung shows us that the pandemic is only one of many disasters we hold in common. In poems that look to both the past and future, she takes a stand against the extinction of self and memory, challenging the violence of erasure.
The period covered by the book is geologic and vast. It examines present-day evidence of ancient human activity and natural history, including the Lascaux caves, asteroid craters, tar pits, and Viking ruins. The poems include ghazals, thoughtful free verse, and work that takes up the page in reframing classical Chinese oracular texts to situate the pain of a doctor in crisis.
As a physician-poet, Cheung asks us to see beyond the every day to the devastating truths about the human condition.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781946724984
ISBN-10: 194672498X
Pagini: 80
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.07 kg
Editura: ACRE BOOKS
Colecția Acre Books
ISBN-10: 194672498X
Pagini: 80
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.07 kg
Editura: ACRE BOOKS
Colecția Acre Books
Notă biografică
M. Cynthia Cheung is an American poet whose work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, swamp pink, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Houston, Texas.
Cuprins
Boreal Time
I
Ghazal
I Have Seen My Death
Common Disaster No. 1
Notes in a Minor Key
Aubade with Chicxulub Crater and Extinction
Charles Darwin to His Wife, Emma, 1851
Two-Headed Dog
The Amount of Death and Pain in the City was Extraordinary
People Are Sad
a supreme court opinion, June 24, 2022
Ghazal
The Last Surgeon in Mariupol
We Would Welcome a Full Investigation into This Matter
Bosworth Field
Concerning a Crushed Temple
II
The Yijing: a pandemic apocrypha
Afternoon Rounds
Forms of Water
Common Disaster No. 2
X-Ray
The Shores of Babylon
Ghazal
Kalends
Time & Again
I Dream of Animals During the Pandemic
Seeing My Patient’s CT Scan
After the Diagnosis
III
Diorama
Ghazal
Summer Palace
Sand-People of Sutton Hoo
Islandic
Common Disaster No. 3
Ensenada
The Blue House: a Feng Shui Portrait
I Wonder as I Listen to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
Grotto
After My Daughters Tell Me They Are Learning How to Identify Animals at School
Sightseeing
Dream of the Astrobleme
Incarnation
Kite
Ghazal
Still Life
Acknowledgments
I
Ghazal
I Have Seen My Death
Common Disaster No. 1
Notes in a Minor Key
Aubade with Chicxulub Crater and Extinction
Charles Darwin to His Wife, Emma, 1851
Two-Headed Dog
The Amount of Death and Pain in the City was Extraordinary
People Are Sad
a supreme court opinion, June 24, 2022
Ghazal
The Last Surgeon in Mariupol
We Would Welcome a Full Investigation into This Matter
Bosworth Field
Concerning a Crushed Temple
II
The Yijing: a pandemic apocrypha
Afternoon Rounds
Forms of Water
Common Disaster No. 2
X-Ray
The Shores of Babylon
Ghazal
Kalends
Time & Again
I Dream of Animals During the Pandemic
Seeing My Patient’s CT Scan
After the Diagnosis
III
Diorama
Ghazal
Summer Palace
Sand-People of Sutton Hoo
Islandic
Common Disaster No. 3
Ensenada
The Blue House: a Feng Shui Portrait
I Wonder as I Listen to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
Grotto
After My Daughters Tell Me They Are Learning How to Identify Animals at School
Sightseeing
Dream of the Astrobleme
Incarnation
Kite
Ghazal
Still Life
Acknowledgments
Recenzii
“The poems of Common Disaster arise with such precision and clarity—extraordinary in their lyric terrains, their veracities of insightful and hard-earned detail, and their many brilliant accomplishments at the level of the line as well as in expansive response to the exigencies of the catastrophic time—that readers will come away from the page replenished, informed, surprised, and even saved by them. Thematically ambitious but never grandiose, formally considered but never formally constrained, M. Cynthia Cheung has been hard at work in the forum of life and death. Her poetics are those of the highest order, arriving with grace and intelligence, substance and vigor, beyond language while also before it. I cannot turn away from these poems, and, with conviction, believe that the poems of Common Disaster will take hold and continue ‘to carry / all we cannot speak.’”
“M. Cynthia Cheung has a mind that is wild and vivid and impossible to predict. Here, Cheung meditates on the complexities of dying in hospital, on the indignities and hopes of the helpless, on the dailiness of mortal threat. Here, also, she considers a horrifying sand burial near Sutton Hoo, or the mind of Charles Darwin, or the experience of a world-obliterating meteor sixty-six million years ago. Here is a two-headed dog and the origins of transplant surgery and here are the living wolves at Chernobyl. Common Disaster is a book of great technical skill, craftsmanship, and variety, a book obsessed not only with witnessing history and daily life, but finding in them the profoundly human truths—the facts of mortality, of environment, of family, and of love. This is a terrific first book, one I will return to with great pleasure.”
"Ghazals with refrains that range from 'nowhere' to the 'Orient' to 'God,' scatterplots of intense phrases, prose poems, and free verse combine in this collection that showcases admirable ambition and dexterity. Physician-poet M. Cynthia Cheung incorporates a strong personal and political conscience in her science-quickened art. She has made poems that are 'Continents scarred with cuneiform,' giving voice to present-day headlines and niche history with equal insight and compassion. Common Disaster is a rare blessing of a book."
" Equally confessional and structurally complex, the poems of Common Disaster—even with their attention to scientific detail—are neither esoteric nor didactic; rather, Cheung’s speaker pulls back the veil on keenly human reactions to our present moment. . . . Common Disaster is a timely collection, offering reflection and guidance for the crises experienced in common, both large and small."