Overview

A remarkable debut collection that chronicles the experience of anxiety and anguish in the face of COVID-19. As a front-line physician, M. Cynthia Cheung started writing poetry during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her remarkable debut collection, Common Disaster, chronicles these experiences. Confronting not just the coronavirus but also war crimes and the death of loved ones, Cheung shows us that the pandemic is only one of many disasters we hold in common. In poems that look to both the past and future, she takes a stand against the extinction of self and memory, challenging the violence of erasure The period covered by the book is geologic and vast. It examines present-day evidence of ancient human activity and natural history, including the Lascaux caves, asteroid craters, tar pits, and Viking ruins. The poems include ghazals, thoughtful free verse, and work that takes up the page in reframing classical Chinese oracular texts to situate the pain of a doctor in crisis. As a physician-poet, Cheung asks us to see beyond the every day to the devastating truths about the human condition.

Full Product Details

Author:   M. Cynthia Cheung
Publisher:   Acre Books
Imprint:   Acre Books
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 0.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.113kg
ISBN:  

9781946724984

ISBN 10:   194672498
Pages:   80
Publication Date:   15 November 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock  
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Table of Contents

Boreal Time I Ghazal I Have Seen My Death Common Disaster No. 1 Notes in a Minor Key Aubade with Chicxulub Crater and Extinction Charles Darwin to His Wife, Emma, 1851 Two-Headed Dog The Amount of Death and Pain in the City was Extraordinary People Are Sad a supreme court opinion, June 24, 2022 Ghazal The Last Surgeon in Mariupol We Would Welcome a Full Investigation into This Matter Bosworth Field Concerning a Crushed Temple II The Yijing: a pandemic apocrypha Afternoon Rounds Forms of Water Common Disaster No. 2 X-Ray The Shores of Babylon Ghazal Kalends Time & Again I Dream of Animals During the Pandemic Seeing My Patient’s CT Scan After the Diagnosis III Diorama Ghazal Summer Palace Sand-People of Sutton Hoo Islandic Common Disaster No. 3 Ensenada The Blue House: a Feng Shui Portrait I Wonder as I Listen to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 Grotto After My Daughters Tell Me They Are Learning How to Identify Animals at School Sightseeing Dream of the Astrobleme Incarnation Kite Ghazal Still Life Acknowledgments

Reviews

“The poems of Common Disaster arise with such precision and clarity—extraordinary in their lyric terrains, their veracities of insightful and hard-earned detail, and their many brilliant accomplishments at the level of the line as well as in expansive response to the exigencies of the catastrophic time—that readers will come away from the page replenished, informed, surprised, and even saved by them. Thematically ambitious but never grandiose, formally considered but never formally constrained, M. Cynthia Cheung has been hard at work in the forum of life and death. Her poetics are those of the highest order, arriving with grace and intelligence, substance and vigor, beyond language while also before it. I cannot turn away from these poems, and, with conviction, believe that the poems of Common Disaster will take hold and continue ‘to carry / all we cannot speak.’” * Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of “Ex Machina” *

Author Information

M. Cynthia Cheung is an American poet whose work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, swamp pink, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Houston, Texas.

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