Clearing the Stage: A Suite from/for Pandemic Times, by Anne Lovering Rounds

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Clearing the Stage is a longform elegy composed in New York City during the unfolding of the Covid pandemic. The suite is in three parts: “Prologue,” “Specimens,” and “Not / Epilogues.” The poems in the “Specimens” section reflect the initial stages of the pandemic in March and April 2020, drawing language directly from Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days as well as from 20th-century poets in Whitman’s lineage, including Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg. The prologue and epilogue, while filling traditional roles of poetic opening and closure, speak to the nebulous character of the pandemic: the idea that it may always be, in some sense, unknown and unfinished.The poems in Clearing the Stage do not seek to “heal” the complex traumas inflicted by the pandemic. Rather, they allow and even instruct readers to sit with dissonance and release. Instead of invoking a lyric “I,” the poems attempt to open towards a broader lyric “you.”The title of the