Pandemic City is a book straight out of a historical moment, replete with its paradoxes—too much intimacy and too much isolation, too much time on our hands and time literally running out. It is also self-exposing and funny, reactive and responsive. McDonell is willing to say what we know but are not saying—that under COVID mothers are twinning with their children, that simple evenings at home have become refractions of our political moral injury, that every autobiography, especially for women, has now become a story of loneliness: (“It is a place now, what/spiritualists call being/shut off from God,/ what psychiatrists call/despair, what Stranger Things /called the upside-down.”) McDonell’s verse will help you explain yourself to yourself, and help all of us explain ourselves to ourselves. —ALISSA QUART, author of the poetry books Thoughts and Prayers and Monetized and non-fiction, including Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America. Foreword by poet and journalist Betsy Andrews, and cover art by Jessica Nissen. $15.24