A series of poems meditating on the isolation and unexpected gratitude of a woman living alone in Los Angeles in the Spring and Summer of 2020. From the days before stay at home orders, through working from home and online birthday celebrations, and the re-emergence into the world, Lisa Eve Cheby creates space for us to memorialize, heal, and bloom forth from this surreal shared experience.
Contact Tracing is a dazzling, sensory and full-body dive into the earliest months of the pandemic; Lisa Eve Cheby paints our existence, frozen, even while time moves forward. She demonstrates a remarkable skill with the line, the story and the ability to document a time that we all endured and relate to. We journey with her to the end of this majestic work, an accounting of this fraught time, with a surprising ability to recover, not without scars, and to declare It is OK to enjoy being alive.
-Carla Sameth, Co-Poet Laureate of Altadena, author of Secondary Inspections
In the isolation of the pandemic lockdown, Lisa Eve Cheby's Los Angeles balcony becomes a microcosm not only of her life in gardening but her life in a world in crisis. Contact Tracing, a work of keen and intimate observation, embodies an exquisite exchange with immediate experience. Cheby's poems stand as an elegy for our collective suffering and a reminder of the importance of community, lest we forget how much we need one another.
- Bonnie S. Kaplan, Poet, Performer, Educator
Lisa Eve Cheby, poet extraordinaire, in Contact Tracing takes us to the core of anxiety and uncertainty as we locked down and Covid chaos reigned. While navigating shifting priorities and familial fault lines Cheby re-creates the world when hummingbirds were sacred visitors and our heartbeat the only sound we heard. Lyrical, mesmerizing, and utterly compelling.
- Désirée Zamorano, author of The Amado Women