An Indie Next Selection for December 2021
A Ms. Magazine Recommended Read for Fall 2021
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In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of
the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker
and Karthika Naïr--living mere miles from each other but separated by
circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time--began a
correspondence in verse.
Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of
alternating tanka beginning with the themes of tōki and tōza: this
season, this session. Here, from the "plague spring," through a year in
which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker
and Naïr's renga charts the "differents and sames" of a now-shared
experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some
things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity
persists--even thrives--in the face of a strange new kind of isolation.
Between "ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones," there's cancer and
chemotherapy and the aches of an aging body. There is grief for the loss
of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States,
Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where
we all are "mere atoms of water, / each captained by protons of
hydrogen, hurtling earthward."
At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different
Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women
witnessing a singular moment in history.
