Arrowsmith Press is proud to announce the publication of John Okrent’s This Costly Season. In this debut collection, Okrent, himself a physician, chronicles his experience of the Covid epidemic in forty-nine beautifully crafted sonnets. Witnessing those terrible days of 2020, every poem resonates with the sounds of crisis, reflecting Okrent’s front-line experiences over a seemingly endless season of illness and death.
Like the WWI poets, who wrote not from a school but from the field, Okrent laments, “A world like this one, even this one,/will be fine—as in finished, perfected. But I’m/fragmented—and so tired/of the dead.” In the midst of suffering, Okrent is a (sometimes helpless) healer, a witness to both the devastation and, at the same time, to the beauty that continues to flower in spite of it—even in “a ship of gurneys at the pier.”
The sonnets bear witness to the shuttering of businesses, the protection of loved ones, deaths of patients, West Coast fires, and seemingly endless isolation from March to September. Okrent returns again and again to the lulls found in the natural world: “day breaks its glass of light on the harbor/and I take it—like a chance—like a cure.” This remarkable book brings readers close to what it means to be human in times such as these.