Shelter in This Place

The beauty of this collection of poetry and prose is the way it captures the rawness of the pandemic, especially in its early days. Even just a year later, many of the pieces do provide a kind of shelter from the way we have twisted the deep and pure emotions of fear, rage, and grief of 2020 into the manufactured conspiracies and expanded violence of 2021. How is it possible that in reading these experiences I felt transported back to a simpler age? Yet, I did. We have lived a thousand lives and died 700,000 deaths since last year. Shelter in This Place provides a snapshot in time; a reminder of where we found hope and where despair welled; how we coped and how we cried; who we celebrated and who we were when our only companion was in the mirror. It will be important, from time to time, to take shelter in that memory.