Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic by Ellen Austin-Li

Perhaps historical events, like forests, have understories, the life that grows beneath the overarching shadow. If so, the poems in Ellen Austin-Li’s Lockdown tell an understory of the COVID-19 pandemic, one woman’s experience of the fear and grief of the early days of the virus—a son in quarantine after time away at school, a doctor husband who faces daily exposure, the dangers of isolation for a recovering alcoholic. “We are not a safe house.” And too, these poems tell a story of resilience: the survivor bees’ “stringed sound/of thousands of wings vibrating” played to an audience of one; the cherry tree, “having opened each bud against darkness.” “Composing poems during the lockdown kept me sane,” Austin-Li writes in her Acknowledgements. We, her readers, are grateful for the clarity and wisdom of these poems.

–Pauletta Hansel, author of Friend; Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus.

Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic proves to me yet again that art is what sustains me in the hardest times. Threaded with lyrical, mythic embroidery, Austin-Li’s pandemic chapbook weaves a glittering dewy web. The opening poem pulled me in like an undertow: “Virus ringing the globe, wringing hands held apart, washed warm with water, worn and wrung with worry.”

I was swept on the tide of warm, intimate interior moments—runny egg yolks with ramen, singing teenagers, unwashed faces, bees buzzing, childhood lakes—then slapped awake by clinical reality stinging with antiseptic, such as in the poem “Dirge for the Victims of Covid19”, where Austin-Li addresses the dead victims, “stuffed in/body bags, piled in trucks, left just short of frozen.”

Austin-Li’s gathering of poems captures the alternating dreamscape and waking nightmare of daily life in a pandemic, the way fear ripples and resonates backwards and forwards in time. In the darkness, sustaining memories of closeness and hope shine—“Oh, to hold tight my friends, to breathe in/so close, I smell the mint gum in their mouths.” Beautiful work.

–Elaine Olund, Author of The Invisible Suitcase, Finishing Line Press, 2020

Ellen Austin-Li’s chapbook, Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic, chronicles the upheaval of life brought about by the pandemic with courage and vulnerability. Written during the first wave, Austin-Li’s poems examine the surreal perversity of our days in quarantine, when the speaker’s isolation can be countered by the joy of a beehive and where the mind-numbing everydayness of a run still means we are barreling uncertain into the future. Most of all, it’s about how we yearn to hold loved ones close and keep them safe when we are helpless to do so. With a variety of forms, including erasures, Austin-Li’s chapbook is a testament to a very particular and painful time in our collective history and is not to be missed.
–Rebecca Connors, author of Split Map, winner of the Dare to Speak Chapbook competition hosted by Minerva Rising Press.