With the closure of bookstores and in-person readings impossible, sales opportunities for small presses have largely been stymied to the point of near fatality, and the fallout is widespread.

A book or books that you once loved isn’t quite the same thing as a painful memory, but for me, rereading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman felt similarly unapproachable because it had direct ties to a past iteration of myself.

These verbal capsules contain universes—seemingly ordinary worlds that transform, as a matter of course, in unexpected and mysterious ways. A woman gets a stomachache and lays an egg. A man gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a seahorse and floats out to sea. I’m finding them to be perfect reading for a pandemic.

Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.

It is difficult to track the speaker of Shimoda’s poems, as his work permeates the delineation between self and other. With this untethering, Shimoda creates a body of text and formal space that unites human and nonhuman aspects of the desert, embodying it as something internal.

When can I see you? we asked each other, but we really wanted to know, when can we be in the same room? When can we kiss, touch, and hold one another? How long must we emulate the sexless lives of hermits? A few more weeks, a few more months, a whole year?