Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic

Art meets historical archive in Ellen Austin-Li's second poetry collection, Lockdown: Scenes from Early in the Pandemic. These poems center around life during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic: the mysterious virus as myth & fairytale, the first-responder husband, a son in quarantine, New York City's devastating refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues. Grief, fear, and nostalgia for our relatively carefree pre-COVID lives ("oh / let us slow dance to a fast song / because we can") weaves a fabric that memorializes this international trauma. This book shows us that learning to live with fear and uncertainty uncovers the resilience we often don't know we have: "So you walk outdoors toward the blossoms / And the monster loses its hold in the trees /And you stand beneath the pink and crimson, / Its scent-feast you pray will cleanse and release /As the petals rain down in a shower."

Born and raised in Upstate, New York, Ellen Austin-Li now lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and two sons. Ellen is an award-winning poet published in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, Writers Tribe Review, the Maine Review, Panoply, Green Briar Review, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and other places. Her first chapbook, Firefly, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. A recipient of the Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship in Poetry, she is an MFA in Poetry candidate at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College. Find more of her writing at ellenaustinli.me.