Knopf will publish an anthology of 85 poems inspired by the coronavirus pandemic, the publisher announced in a news release on Wednesday.
Alice Quinn is editing Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, which is slated for release this spring. Poets contributing to the anthology include Billy Collins, Ada Limón, Carl Phillips, Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, Major Jackson, Susan Minot, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
“The anthology speaks to this moment of the virus and its repercussions, and it will be a marker in the future for the new brand of uncertainty and kinship most of us are feeling so profoundly,” Quinn said. “The poems range in tone from sorrowful to fiercely resilient, wry and wistful to emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability and struggles of human beings in dramatically frightening times.”
The book gets its title from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Keeping Quiet,” which reads in part, “It would be an exotic moment / without rush, without engines; / we would all be together / in a sudden strangeness.”
Knopf says the poems in the collection “provide wisdom and companionship, depths of feeling that enliven our spirits, and a poignant summoning to the page of spring’s inevitable return.”
Together in a Sudden Strangeness is slated for publication on June 9.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
