Twenty Pandemicals

Twenty Pandemicals is a smart, skeptical secular book of hours whose beautifully crafted poems depict the collective doubts and hopes of America's anxious lockdown months. Apocalypse, Charlotte Innes reminds us, isn't confined to the viral threat-homelessness, California wildfires, scorched-earth politics, and more persist whether we venture outside or not-but family bonds and memory's grace offer some solace. With her native England as out of reach as relief from the pandemic's constraints, the poet finds freedom in these sixteen-line poems, each of them memorable, moving, and marked by empathy. Though Innes knows "the world's burning / like-I'll say it-the fires of Armageddon," she also reminds us it's best at times to "shun / the dark" and "think of beautiful souls tonight." This accomplished, and timely, collection is an understated marvel.

-Ned Balbo, author of The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots

In Twenty Pandemicals, Charlotte Innes offers us a conversation of poems embracing the intimate and the immense in this time of global distress. Plague, politics, the fires of climate change, the quotidian experience of cleaning and shopping, of food and flowers-all participate. We share the emotional journey of "having felt so separate for / so long." At the same time, the poems persistently stretch our perspective as they carry us from "a blitz / of order" to "a madness // we can't control" until we find ourselves in a place where we "prepare to drown" or "laugh our joyous socks off." These poems are "sandpipers... gathering daily to parse the ocean's / endless argument on weight and froth."

-Hilda Weiss, curator, Poetry.LA, a video gallery of poets in Southern California

These jaunty and defiantly upbeat poems, called "pandemicals" by poet Charlotte Innes, bring a kind of calming order to our disorderly times. Delightfully iambic, each poem is written in rhyming quatrains which give the collection a formality that soothes and elevates, even though each poem confronts in some fashion the harsh realities of 2020. While she bravely observes "the serpent's shadow," and admits that "this won't end well," she also encourages her readers to imagine "cures for sadness, something slant, old scars / that signal mending... a banjo bright as stars." Charlotte Innes is a lyric poet at the height of her powers, and this book is a gift to all of us who are struggling to thrive despite the very real fears and dangers of these times.

-Gail Wronsky, author of Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New and Selected Poems