“John Okrent’s well-crafted crown of sonnets about being a doctor during the pandemic is unexpected and necessary, compulsively readable, haunting and hallucinatory. There is something both very ancient and very new about these eloquent, interlocking poems of worry, illness, supplication, and praise.”
This Costly Season
by John Okrent
In the midst of the Covid pandemic, a medical doctor chose to express the depth of what he was encountering through forty-nine magnificently crafted sonnets. John Okrent's This Costly Season examines what it was like to be on the front lines of the loss of others, as well as encountering his own grief, while holding on to the preciousness of life and the beauty of our world. This book will bring you close to what it means to be human in times such as these, and inspire you to remember how to endure no matter what the circumstances. Truly a book of poems for our times, by a caretaker and poet of the highest order.
“The tension between caring for others and caring for oneself, especially as a professional caregiver, extend and amplify the questions laid out before us all. “What I bring home with me: mortality / and an empty thermos.” The humdrum of daily life, the thermos that needs washing, heightened by the unknowns of a novel pandemic. The rest of us might well have clapped from windows, but what did it feel like on the other end of that applause?”
-Joseph Osmundson, Electric Lit
John Okrent
John Okrent is a poet and a family doctor. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Field, and The Seattle Times, among other journals. He was chosen by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2021 Jeff Marks Memorial Prize. Okrent works at a community health center in Tacoma, WA, where he lives with his wife and two young children in a fisherman’s cabin on Puget Sound.
“John Okrent is a poet of caretaking. This Costly Season is a book that will help us begin again in the pandemic’s wake. More than any book I have read this year, this book of poems uses the poetic line to test out, and find, versions of the new truths by which we find ourselves living.”
“These are the most heartbreaking and delicate poems about the pandemic, about human frailty, and the opposite of that frailty, that I have ever experienced. They are Okrent’s elegies and odes to a profoundly dangerous time in history that doesn’t want to go away. This is a miracle collection and each one of these poems is a long slow kiss into the face of oblivion as they slam it to the dirt and kick its ass.”
“The miracle of this collection is the love of the speaker for every aspect of life, including its final days. This sequence seems like a prayer, the prayer of one who feels blessed by life on earth.”
“This Costly Season is a defining poetry collection for our now ineluctable experience of plague. Like Petrarch, Keats, and Whitman, whose influence undertows these poems, Okrent is a poet who explores the metaphysics of mortality under pressure.”
