In her memoir Days of Grace and Silence (2024), Ann E. Wallace gives shape and resonance to her experience as an illness exile navigating long-haul COVID, from March 2020 through the spring of 2023. Wallace was the Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey, from 2023 to 2024, and has written about illness, disability, and disease for more than 30 years. Her first collection of poetry, Counting by Sevens (2019) also features reflections on illness and her role as a parent. In Days of Grace and Silence, Wallace’s poems pierce through the suffocating vacuum-sealed isolation that COVID spawned, opening doors for respite, connection, and compassion.
Her first poem, “The Porches of Strangers,” the only poem out of sequence in this chronological work, speaks to the accumulation of singular traumas collectively experienced during the height of COVID’s intensity. At the outset she generously gathers her readers on her own “front porch,” where I found space for my own grief as a “recovering COVID-era hospitalist” alongside the grief of others:
Each of us has suffered, suffers still, has grieved,
in our own way, behind closed doors or before eyes
that do not see. We are of a city, of this nation,
where living is not easy. Our needs these years
have been hard and our losses harder (“The Porches of Strangers,” 15).
For Wallace, who contracted COVID at the very beginning of the pandemic, the losses mounted steadily. She worried about her teenage daughters, who were also sick. Her world shrank, circumscribed by the tethering of oxygen tubing:
I suck in each brittle breath,
as my windpipe closes
around the thin flow
that sticks at the base of my throat,
then sears into my waiting lungs (”Hunger,” 66).
Caught in the vise of a long respiratory illness, Wallace’s search for her next breath dominated her days, weeks, and months, a theme revisited throughout the collection. This illness forced her to live in the moment. In a discussion of storytelling and poetry during COVID, Barrett et al. suggests that “poetry can return us viscerally to ourselves in strange times” (3). Through the precision of poetry, Wallace generously shares this elemental existence.
Sometimes Wallace expands her conversation more broadly to acknowledge other losses that marked the COVID landscape. Along with politicized contagions, financial worries exacerbated the viral load of suffering, themes discussed in “Fool’s Gold” (44), “Fathoming” (56), “What Luck” (98), and “Water World” (111). Her illness also brought forward a decades-long familiarity with serious illness, first as a young woman with ovarian cancer and later when diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which she shares in “Training Ground” (93-94),” ”The Alchemy of Survival” (97), ”Imprints” (99), and “Practice” (114).
In the midst of these accumulated sufferings and challenging themes, Wallace delivers on her title. Her intimate conversational style drew me in close. It’s almost as if she is tending to a visitor with a warm casserole and hot mug of tea while sick in bed, yet still balancing her own need for self care:
I struggle here, to find
the line between kindnesses—
between being a good human
and being good to myself. And truly,
why do those things feel at odds,
and how might I lift my gaze
upon myself if I held a line
here, between you and me? (“Note to Self: Two Kindnesses, or One,” 106)
Wallace paces her collection with both herself and the reader in mind.. She begins the collection with a flurry of poems in the section “Days of Pressure and Fog” as acute illness descends, and then the narrative moves more slowly, allowing time for processing before ending with the section, “The Infinity of Hope.” Punctuated by shorter, matter-of-fact poems, capturing some of the hardest moments, Wallace offers snapshots of serious illness that might be more manageable for those already immersed in a world of trauma. Consider the brief poem, “Isolation, Apart” from April 2020:
This unyielding wall of isolation
divides us for safety
me from you,
you from me.
My viral load in quarantine.
Your essential risk in circulation.
Two separate terrors
experienced alone, alone (48).
With economy and grace, Wallace’s COVID-era poems bridge difficult experiences where language has failed many of us, myself included. I found solace in the poem “This Virus, a Villanelle,” which seemed to conjure up my pandemic experience caring for the sick in the rural Midwest in relative isolation:
An unending circling round, each wretched swell
pushes me down, as I gasp for air alone
tumbling backward into these waves of hell (This Virus, a Villanelle, 57).
Poetry, even in its brevity—maybe because of it—may serve as an accessible tonic for those of us still looking around wild-eyed for a place to process the onslaught of COVID, whether as patients or healthcare workers or both. I am still seeing patients in the hospital admitted with COVID. A healthcare worker in Ireland taking care of patients in a rehab center-turned-COVID ward observed that “the struggle to find language appropriate to the circumstances—a kind of pandemic-induced expressive dysphasia…” led staff to lean into poetry to care for their patients and themselves (O’Hanlon, 968). When words fall apart and scatter “in a fragile year of disease and mourning” (“House of Gold,” 67), the poet slips in to piece them back together.
Days of Grace and Silence offers an entry point into navigating the fractured pathways between the self that is sick and the self that is well—for Wallace a cruel disconnect between lungs and air. Her collection probes the unrelenting uncertainty of illness while still clinging to resilience:
And I fell sick again. And again.
Each time, I tinkered, trying to spark
an ember from basest of metals, dark
and lifeless, until the smallest flare
of hope caught fire and I bent over,
cupped my hands around the flame
and blew gently until it danced (”The Alchemy of Survival,” 97)
In its entirety, Days of Grace and Silence offers a meditation on the chronicity of a sickness layered with the remembered grief of prior illnesses. With poems of such varying lengths, it’s as if, we, too, are pausing to gasp for breath along with Wallace. Getting through the long haul of illness means reckoning with the balance of words and silence, depending on what is most needed in that moment. Wallace employs both skillfully to connect us all through uncertainty and discomfort while nurturing hope, one breath at a time.
Works Cited
Barrett, Elizabeth et al. “Storytelling and Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus.” Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine vol. 37, no. 4, 2020, pp. 278-282. doi:10.1017/ipm.2020.36
O’Hanlon, Shane. “The Comfort of Poetry in a Pandemic.” Journal of General Internal Medicine vol. 37, no. 4, 2022, pp. 968-969. doi:10.1007/s11606-021-07338-8
Wallace, Ann E. Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul. Kelsay Books, 2024.
