So Much Is Beautiful, So Much Is Broken: Poems from the Pandemic

By Jill Kelly

For the first four months of the pandemic, I wrote a poem a day about my experience. I was at home alone with my four cats and ventured out only to walk a mile in my Portland, Oregon, neighborhood. These are some of my reflections and my experiences as the old normal fell away and we entered this strange and disorienting time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jill Kelly
• Release date: Sep 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005057145

Jill Kelly

I began writing in 2002 with a memoir that was a finalist for the prestigious Oregon Book Award. Since then I've been writing most days in the morning for an hour or so and am currently working on book #10. It's just so fun. I'm a big reader of mysteries and thrillers and have written three of my own. I also enjoy exploring the relationships between men and women, and mothers and daughters. I'm a former college professor of literature and writing who's been a freelance editor for the last 25 years. I am also a pastel and acrylic painter and I make art deco needlepoint pillows (www.jillkellycreative.com). I live in Portland, Oregon, with my four cats who do all the chores so I can be creative 24/7.

Book preview

ALSO BY JILL KELLY

Fiction

The Color of Longing

Fog of Dead Souls

When Your Mother Doesn’t

Broken Boys

When the Past Comes Calling: 6 Guys, 1 Girl, 1 Night

Nonfiction

Sober Truths: The Making of an Honest Woman

Sober Play: Using Creativity for a More Joyful Recovery

Candy Girl: How I Gave up Sugar and Created a Sweeter Life between Meals

The Candy Girl Workbook

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Also by Jill Kelly

A Cartography of Quarantine

The First Fear

How It Starts

I Want to Believe It Will

Despite the Fear of 4 AM

The Faint Line

My Body Knows It’s Real

Welcoming My Worry

The World Out There

All the Other Worries

Editing Out the Pandemic

Wrestling with Hamlet’s Question

Canary on a Ventilator

Commutation

The Runaway

Mrs Fauci Waits Each Night

Largely at Home

The Way Out Is In

Pandemic To-Do List

Those Bonds the Net

Keeping My Eye on the Good

1950s Quarantine

Too Close for Comfort

Fearing the Familiar

Even a Dollar Is a Moral Dilemma

Being Touched for the First Time

Since Where Is the Courage for Big Change

I Know but They Don’t Seem to

My Small World

Driving Myself Nowhere in Particular

Happiness Sneaked up on Me

The Rediscovery of Quiet

Treasure Hunt on the 34th Walk

Neighborhood Symphony

At Last the Rain

I’ve Got Me, Babe

A Trip to Punxsutawney

Another Day like Yesterday

O Blah De, O Blah Da

Blursday

Survival Blues

I Have to Laugh

My Kitchen Doesn’t Want to See Me

Feline Pandemia

Grasping at the Old Normal

Busier Than Ever

COVID as an STD

Where Planning Used to Be

In the Palace

The Melancholy of Zoom

When A Visit Isn’t a Visit

It Never Occurred to Me I’d Miss Them

The Same Beautiful Ride

Staying with the Drill

I Have to Laugh Again

A Self-Hack

The COVID Closet

The World Out There Again

Death by Number

Reopening Blues

The Beautiful, the Broken

Across the Courtyard

July 4th Polemic

The Color of Quarantine

We’re in This Together

The Way Ahead

I Am Willing to Live

When You Wake in the Night

Then the Door Slammed Shut

Hello Lethargy, My Old Friend

It Isn’t Over Till It’s Over

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