“I’m pretty good at being sick,” Poet Laureate of Jersey City Ann Wallace says over Zoom. “I know how to navigate the healthcare system. I know how to advocate for myself.”
Wallace has dealt with illness throughout her life, a survivor of ovarian cancer in her early twenties, an MS diagnosis in her thirties, and more recently long Covid. But Wallace remains resilient, channeling her breath into poetry and refusing to stay silent. Her memoir-in-verse “Days of Grace & Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul” (Kelsay Books) tracks her experience of living with illness, uncertainty, and hope over three years from the start of the Covid pandemic. A book launch party for the public will be held at Art House Productions (345 Marin Boulevard, Jersey City) on Friday, April 12th, at 6:30 pm. Admission is free.
“I wrote my first poem about Covid in late March” of 2020 called Quarantined Hours, says Wallace. “Then on April 1st for National Poetry Month,” she decided to do what she normally does in April: “write a poem a day, but this was a push. My cognitive facilities were limited. I was on bed rest and very hypoxic.”
Wallace wrote “For the House Finches,” about the birds in her backyard and resigning herself to the fact that she could no longer feed them, “but on April 1st, I did feed them one last time then shuffled back inside and collapsed. “I kept writing,” Wallace said. “I kept writing about not only my own illness but what I was seeing through my phone screen, computer screen, or on the news about the world around me.”
Because of her MS, Wallace thought she would be sick for a month, “but a month came and went.” Wallace couldn’t stand without feeling like she was going to pass out, her oxygen levels dropped, and she struggled to speak. “Writing was my means of communication.”
As a literary scholar and poet, Wallace writes about illness and the ways that women write their body. One of Wallace’s influences is Audre Lorde, who wrote the Cancer Journals. “She was a black, lesbian, activist poet, and she didn’t see those kinds of people reflected in the breast cancer community of the 70s. Writing against silence was incredibly important. It’s a mindset and motivation that drives a lot of my writing.”
Wallace also mentioned Susan Gubar’s Memoir of a Debulked Woman documenting Grubar’s struggle with Ovarian cancer. “Those are the kinds of voices I had in my mind in spring 2020. There were no voices on Covid yet. I had to create a record.”
“I was writing very specifically from this area,” Wallace said about Jersey City. Her fiance, Konstantin, is a funeral director who was facing his own horror spring 2020 while Wallace was quarantined in her house, struggling to breathe. “It’s really painful to think back on. The death, the vast scale of it was not something people in many other parts of the country were seeing and living through that March and April. Refrigerated trucks outside hospitals were overflowing. In New York City, they buried bodies in temporary graves on Hart Island in the East River.”
Wallace reads a few lines from her poem about Hart Island, April Mud.
The men on Hart Island, buried last month’s
dead who waited two weeks, alone, unclaimed,
together in city morgues filled past capacity
to be interred in plain boxes on a wet April day
while the birds in my backyard sang.
For Wallace, writing poetry is “much more intimate and visceral” than writing prose, which is why it’s a resource she can draw on. “There’s room for silence and incomplete thoughts. The embodied sensation of living through Covid was something I could capture through poetry. Of course, poetry is not a medical resource, but it’s a human resource that we can turn to for confirmation of what we are living through. It allows us a window into something we haven’t experienced. It gives us empathy.”