This Costly Season

"Urgent, improvisatory, diaristic-John Okrent's well-crafted crown of sonnets about being a doctor during the pandemic, our pandemic, is unexpected and necessary, compulsively readable, haunting and hallucinatory. There is something both very ancient and very new about these eloquent, interlocking poems of worry, illness, supplication, and praise. --Edward Hirsch These are the most heartbreaking and delicate poems about the pandemic, about human frailty, and the opposite of that frailty, that I have ever experienced. They are Okrent's elegies and odes to a profoundly dangerous time in history that doesn't want to go away. This is a miracle collection and each one of these poems is a long slow kiss into the face of oblivion as they slam it to the dirt and kick its ass. --Matthew Lippman, poet, author of Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful John Okrent's magnificent crown of sonnets imbues the form with energy, empathy and surprise. His approach to the world is all-encompassing and humane The miracle of this collection is the love of the speaker for every aspect of life, including its final days. ""We are made of breathing,"" he writes, ""and breathing ends."" His attention is certain and specific, full of remarkable perceptions, such as last week's tulips bowing their ""ludicrous heads,"" which says, without articulating it, that they hold a reverent pose, as in prayer. And the sequence seems like a prayer, the prayer of one who feels blessed by life on earth. Chekhov said that one must feel compassion down to his fingertips, a virtue John Okrent shares with that writer, as well as his vocation, and writing that is blindingly beautiful. --John Skoyles John Okrent's This Costly Season is a defining poetry collection for our now ineluctable experience of plague. As a doctor on the front lines of COVID, there can be no ""emotion recollected in tranquility,"" but rather diaristic poems of candor and lyric intensity that chart his speaker's daily progress as physician, father and citizen of a country roiling with discontent, violence and disease. Okrent writes with a formal ease and immediacy that still keeps meaningful connection with the sonnet crown's structure. Like Petrarch, Keats, and Whitman, whose influence undertows these poems, Okrent is a poet who explores the metaphysics of mortality under pressure. --Erin Belieu John Okrent is a poet of caretaking. This Costly Season is a book that will help us begin again in the pandemic's wake. More than any book I have read this year, this book of poems uses the poetic line to test out, and find, versions of the new truths by which we find ourselves living. Tense and agile final lines of sonnets serve as first lines of new poems in the form of -the corona, and many of these repeated lines capture the way the mind and heart ca-n, and have, and shall, accommodate to our bewildering new circumstances- ""Gravity is a joke to the cherry blossom,"" ""Summer will be the death of springtime,"" ""I shaved my beard so that the mask might fit."" Though these lines even try to resurrect, for their breath's length, the illusions that maintain us - ""In our cabin we keep the world"" - they seem always to know how fragile they are. In trying again and again to steady us, and in truthfully, beautifully, failing, these lines give us embodied access to some of the wildest, most powerful human virtues, like fortitude and optimism, faith and dignity. --Katie Peterson"