Dubious Breath by Jennifer Davis Michael

These beautiful poems grew out of a kind of emotional claustrophobia of separating ourselves from the world in order to protect the ones we love, registering relief time after time throughout he pandemic that we still have our senses of smell and taste, but what good is touch when you can’t hold your dying father’s hand? In “Dubious Breath” Michael plays with the idea of masking and porosity, challenging them as metaphors for human relations: “the lies that lurk behind a trusted face; / the pathogens that slip between the seams / of masks”; and wonders how we will emerge blinking and bleary eyed from this time of confusion and contraction—how will we see beyond the “windows’ certain glare”? what will we read as signs? And then she does a remarkable thing, poem after poem, Michael creates a new shelter in place, a space in lyric “where we can touch / within the wild, unfathomable world.”

–Leigh Anne Couch, author of Every Lash, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

Jennifer Davis Michael‘s powerful collection of poems, Dubious Breath, chronicles the life of one poet during the Covid-19 pandemic. Crouched cramped with loved ones “inhaling/each other’s dubious breath” the poet sees the world with an uncomfortable clarity, one where “aching eyes long for the blur.” As a reader, I am grateful for Michael’s hard-earned vision that roams from what is immediate and present—a son’s prescient question, “wet sandstone, golden in the fickle light”—to the heartbreaks of those at a distance, both known and unknown. And in the final accounting the poet, too, embraces her clear-eyed, compassionate vision, no matter how painful. “Yes, we are here/preserved by fire.”
–Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Friend