POETRY IN THE pandemic
After a harrowing personal experience, Houston native Julia Guez writes about trauma and healing
NEW YORK — As a poet who feels and understands intricately the ways language works, Julia Guez was aware something was wrong, but she couldn’t quite put it into words at the time.
She left a book event in San Antonio in early March 2020 feeling unwell. She returned to New York, where she lives now, and reached out to her doctor on the cusp of panic, knowing her situation was potentially grave.
“It was early, but there was this sense that ERs around the world were shutting down, which was when we knew this wasn’t a nasty cold,” she says. “I’ve had a nasty cold. And now, as somebody who had COVID without a booster, I’m here to tell you, it’s not the same.
“My heart rate was down. They verified I wasn’t in cardiac arrest. They told me, ‘If you can’t finish a sentence, come back.’ In my mind, that was a challenge. I’m going to finish every (expletive) sentence. Consider that from somebody who took 10 years to finish a book.”
Guez spent more than a month completely wiped out by the virus, while also managing anxiety about spreading a thennew virus to her partner and two children.
“The first week was harrowing,” she says. “We just managed it hour by hour.”
Looking back
More than two years later, Guez sits on the elevated patio of the Whitney Museum of American Art and looks down on a city only recently returning to normal. From this space, she considers a twisting journey that yielded suffering and anxiety offset by resilience and hope.
Her new book, “The Certain Body,” is a product of this fraught time.
Though no silver lining — despite a gorgeous gray cover created around a piece of art by Julie Mehretu — “The Certain
Body” offers context and interpretation of this time and the many ways we are connected: electronically, biologically, socially, culturally. As we struggle to figure out when the end point of a pandemic may be, “The Certain Body” offers a trailhead for considering where we were. Guez’s process this time did not take a decade. Which isn’t to say the verse is hot and impulsive. Illness, recovery and quarantine offer ample time for reflection. Guez’s reflections are layered as the ink on Mehretu’s piece of art: overlapping and matrix-like, but also clear if you choose to follow any line or poem closely.
“The Certain Body” serves as perhaps the first great piece of literature for the strange “now” we find ourselves within. It conveys and contextualizes the gentle joys and formidable frustrations of an extraordinary time.
‘And then what’
Guez in 2019 published “In an Invisible Glass
Case Which Is Also a Frame,” an arresting debut collection of poems. The book was the culmination of a decade of work. She also spent nearly 10 years translating “La mana suicida,” a poetry collection by María Montero, a beloved Costa Rican poet Guez discovered while studying in Central America on a Fulbright Fellowship more than a decade ago.
Guez’s first collection introduced a series of snapshot-type poems under the “Still Life With …” heading. Though her new collection spans more than 40 pages, “Still Life With SARS-CoV-2” speaks to the concision she felt writing her new collection. The poem, in its entirety:
“and then what and then what, what then”
If the piece feels like a mantra or a prayer, well, it still feels like a message in a bottle now.
“I think, as a human, we want to insert a question into that,” she says. “‘What fresh hell is next?’ frankly. What’s around the corner? I feel like we’ve been so hurt and humbled by what has come and how unprepared we were for it.”
Poems about connection
True to its title, Guez’s new collection touches on the body in the most gristly sense, inspired by its vulnerability. But it also uses these fragile moments to consider our interconnectivity as a culture, as a world, as those who write and consume words.
Before Guez gets in a word, she offers a fragment of an epigraph from T.S. Eliot: “Assured of certain certainties,”
Indeed, it closes with a comma: the suggestion that certain certainties are anything but certain.
“There are knee-jerk responses to that,” she admits. “But what is certain from where we began? What survives and what gets forgotten?”
Eliot is both inspiration and antagonist, as Guez carries on some structural forms he inked ages ago, while also finding fault in his belief that “we need a priestly class of Harvardeducated poets who drink with fascists and pilfer from Greek and Latin to the point where people feel like they can’t find the knob on the door.”
Guez’s “The Certain Body,” out Sept. 15, possesses a greater clarity than her previous volume; she says even the collection’s longest poem is “heady but is very much meant to be understood.” She brings up influences that reveal her Houston roots — from University of Houston professor Cristina Rivera Garza to DJ Screw. For being just 43 pages, “The Certain Body” offers nods to Thomas Merton, Emily Dickinson, Susan Sontag and George Floyd. It’s references aren’t showy guests; they’re voices in a choir.
Night and birds
When Guez began to emerge from her illness, she found her senses heightened. From her home in Brooklyn, she noticed the sounds of traffic were muted and the sounds of birds were pronounced.
“It’s the only time I’ve seen New York this way,” she says. “No cars, no people making noise, nothing. It was haunting. And it was beautiful. That became the soundscape of this book.”
Guez’s work also hit a standstill. A Lamar High School and Rice University alumnus, she left for New York, where she teaches at Fordham University and also works with Teach for America, both of which were vocational paths interrupted early by the pandemic.
Her routine would have been disrupted even had she not been infected with the virus.
Not surprisingly, birds flutter throughout “The Certain Body.” “This idea of flying away and up and out, it’s a thing we do when we’re fantasizing when we’re desperate,” she says.
Guez threads trauma — some hers, some ours — throughout the book. “I don’t think we talk about trauma enough,” she says. “Whether it’s poverty, illness, people struggling with fertility or work. … There’s a lot of hurt that can be attributed to something natural, but there’s a lot that is man-made, too. That’s why this virus was so interesting. It doesn’t care where you went to school or who you’re married to or what organization you give your hours to.”
As she walks through the Whitney’s Biennial exhibition, Guez appears most drawn to works with a duality: larger-scale pieces that possess an intricacy. She admits one work she’d hoped to see weeks earlier, Jonathan Berger’s “An Introduction to Nameless Love,” had a cap on the number of people who could access it at any given time. There was a queue and her kids weren’t interested in standing in line.
The piece feels like a natural one to pull Guez’s attention: It’s full of words and phrases cut from tin expressing nonromantic love. The piece is gorgeous and dimly lit, perpetually nocturnal even during daylight hours.
Night falls throughout “The Certain Body,” which isn’t surprising, considering the ways profound illness can twist days and nights into a mess of muddled hours.
“I was intrigued by night because there’s night everywhere, all the time,” Guez says. “And if we’re lucky, another morning comes. We should feel this urgency to make it good and meaningful.”