Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “Love in the Time of Coronavirus”

During the lockdown for COVID-19, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and her husband hunkered down in a small town just outside New York City. And she did what you might expect a poet to do. She wrote poems. She wrote her poems in an almost journal-like experience as she followed the trials and travails of the pandemic.  

The result is Love in the Time of Coronavirus, a collection of 57 poems chronicling the advent of the virus, what happened, and how the lockdown conditions gradually eased. Like many poetry collections, this one is personal. Its title pays homage to the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a story of another pandemic, another time, and another place.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

You Can Go Home Again - to the Bookstore

Earlier this month, I went to a place I hadn’t been in more than a year. 

A bookstore.

 

I had an appointment at the Apple Store at the mall. The goal was to fix the battery drain on my wife’s iPhone after the most recent operating system update. Apple has its store procedures down to a fine art. Make an appointment, arrive a few minutes early to get your temperature taken, stand where designated outside the store until a rep checks you in, stand where designated in the checked-in line, and then a rep comes and gets you for your appointment. In this case, he diagnosed the problem and offered a solution (reset the phone). 

 

I had to make another appointment for the fix. Fortunately, it was for only 90 minutes later. I had some time. And I succumbed to the siren’s call of the mall’s Barnes & Noble store. I hadn’t been in a bookstore since pre-pandemic times, but I was more than two weeks past my second vaccination shot, I was wearing my mask, and I was expert in maintaining social distancing (and giving the evil eye to others who weren’t).

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.