I feel uneasy when any critic announces a poet’s themes and thesis because, at a certain point, poems aren’t interested in anything other than the voices and words they inhabit. If I were so moved, I’d argue that Hạo’s collection doesn’t have a subject; and that his poems resist paraphrase.

But the coronavirus, like any natural disaster, is likely to surprise us. It will certainly change our country. It already has. How we emerge from this pandemic, and this economic illness decades in the making, is unclear.

We live in the midst of the unknown, where we feel indebted daily that our families are still healthy—we know it could change in a moment.

Thon’s story goes one step further: it offers grace, an absolution that requires no atonement.

Before COVID-19, the thing we were fighting was simply a prison sentence. Now, during these COVID days, an illness will kill you before time does.

In the first week or so after everything shut down a lot of people were jumping the fence to hit. To discourage play, the nets were removed. There’s something forlorn and desolate about a tennis court without a net

What happens when you can’t gather more than ten people together? Not only is school canceled, but so is the SAT, the ACT, and AP exams. The absurdity of COVID-style AP test administration is building the conversation around the validity of these exams from a low hum to a rumble.

Opportunities for success rarely get divvied up equitably in this city. That so many already-vulnerable kids are getting left behind feels like just another raw deal for children in Baltimore.

There is a certain surreal quality about life now, the way it has stopped, that reminds me of the days and weeks that followed the earthquake. The difference, of course, is that this is not just happening to us, but to the whole world.