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“What do I get from talking about this?” a patient wonders, months into what has become a pandemic. The analyst records this as his association to the session they have just had, the question one line of eight he will later make into a poem (“Day 131”), itself an association to an eight-clinical-hour day but also companion to a journal kept during the first year of what is referred to as a plague. And while the patient refers consciously to some specific “this,” its location in a book of poems about conducting psychoanalysis during the first year of the COVID pandemic allows us to consider that the question refers also to the pandemic, perhaps even to psychoanalysis and to poetry.
The author tells us that at the beginning of what is at first an epidemic, following lockdowns necessitating a switch from meeting in person to meeting by phone or computer, the analyst retreated into the woods and continued to practice. Donald Moss explains that in trying to make sense of what he was living through inside his relocated office, and instead of listening clinically, he wanted to overhear, to listen “devoid of intention, grounded in accident and serendipity” (p. x). The result is a year of poems about a first year in a plague, an epidemic crisis turning quickly into a pandemic with millions of people infected with what for many became serious illness, thousands and thousands of them dying; drastic social quarantines and lockdowns preventing many from attending school, work, and public gatherings; a political polarization attendant to inequities in virus vulnerability and access to treatment and later to vaccines; international protests and unrest following the widely witnessed murder of George Floyd; and the uncovering of yet other kinds of infection—for example, conspiracy theories—to which many became acutely subject the year beginning March 2020.