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.

“Call this depression on a midnight chime where the dog comes out of a clock and yelps 12 times to compete with my own.”

Here are some of the books that have kept me occupied in isolation, and have helped me forget about this mess we’re in, by immersing my imagination in even bigger, scarier messes.

For Mary South, nurturing is just another way for people to connect, an effort her characters rarely accomplish. These stories focus so intently on the space between people that one could forget anyone ever succeeds in uniting.

“I want to be true to the trouble of the traumas that people are going through without writing trauma stories, because the crucial thing is just who these people are. Not what happened to them, but who they are. I like the idea of aftermath stories. “

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?