Dotty LeMieux, Viruses Guns and War, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, Charlotte, NC, 2023, 43 pages, ISBN: 978-1-59948-956-8, $13
The current decade has been an eventful one, to put it mildly. News pundits, historians, comedians, scientists, and politicians alike have all tried to make sense of our “new normal” through debate, study, irony, data, and policy. The artists and poets among us found inspiration in the strange intersections of fear and hope, isolation and comfort, tragedy and beauty. In the case of Dotty LeMieux, her collection Viruses Guns and War tackles these topics with a series of eclectic, vivid poems. Her writing tugs at memories either forgotten or suppressed, taking the reader by the hand and walking them through experiences simultaneously personal and universal.
LeMieux opens her collection with the beautiful “Nineteen Ways of Looking at a Pandemic”. The title alone sets the tone for the entire collection. There’s the playful reference to Wallace Stevens’ seminal poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” – in a collection that contrasts the beauty of nature with the loneliness of isolation, a reference to Stevens seems particularly fitting. Then there’s the use of 19 rather than 13, a reference to the COVID-19 virus which continues to plague the world; LeMiex excels at finding and exploiting subtle humor in an otherwise very serious time, and this understated wordplay is a prime example of that. The poem itself is as varied as the Stevens’ poem that inspired it, using 19 smaller poems to create one larger one. LeMieux seamlessly bounces from a pessimistic view of a gloomy situation, to awestruck wonder at the beauty of the world, to a tongue-in-cheek reference to the paranoia that gripped the world, to a reverent acknowledgment of the immense suffering that many endured. The first six stanzas alone touch on all of these:
Nineteen Ways of Looking at a Pandemic
after Wallace Stevens
1.
the sound a boulder makes
before beginning
it’s deadly downhill
roll
2.
sunflowers
in their art deco vases
track time by the sun
so well you can set
your watch by it
3.
hush, don’t wake
the old man sleeping
on the park bench
4.
one purple crocus
in my weedy front yard
5.
hey, what do you think
you’re doing?
don’t you know
you can’t play basketball
without touching?
6.
I’m calling the police!
Enough time has passed since the worst days of the pandemic, and with all the clarity that comes with hindsight, LeMieux reflects on it with a poetic irony only an artist could achieve. “Six Feet” notes the recommended space for social distancing is also “the depth of the average grave.” “Like It Was Normal” side-eyes the overused refrain “the new normal,” identifying it for what it truly was – designed intentionally to put physical distance between people, with the unfortunate side effect of putting emotional distance between us as well. “Masks” examines the significance of masks in our society, from their traditional association with mischief, trickery, or crime to their modern association with health and safety. Before the pandemic, the presence of a masked person within a shop would have been cause for alarm; during the pandemic, the lack of a mask became the dreaded deviation.
Of course, the pandemic was not the only world-changing event to take place during 2020. The death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers sparked civil unrest across the nation, with thousands upon thousands risking their health and safety to protest racial injustice. The irony of Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” coupled with the respiratory illness plaguing the world, is not lost on LeMieux.
American knee of oppression
on my neck.
Virus of death
in my lungs
I can’t breathe
At Mendocino waves break
against rock
In Minneapolis rocks
break windows
America you have gone
and done it now
In hospitals everywhere
people are broken
Can’t breathe
We arm ourselves
with paving stones, bottles
The frailty
of a compromised
justice system
Our white skin
our neat homes
our TV screens
won’t protect us
White silence = Violence
Unseen enemies
charge and breach
all defenses
Protestors rock police cars
Police and doctors
Wear face shields
Black Lives Matter
America your immune system
is in tatters
suffers multiple morbidities
rocks won’t cure
plastic shields can’t prevent
In Mendocino we share
wine and outrage
breathe as if
We are all in this together
Nothing could be further from the truth
If this wasn’t already enough, LeMieux continues to examine our modern world with a series of poems about the war in Ukraine, a scathing dress-down of billionaires taking to space, and an examination of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, among other things. She still manages to find beauty in our world, however. Some poems are entirely dedicated to nature; all poems make at least one reference to the beauty that surrounds us. Her final poem, “The Surrealists Had It Right,” perfectly combines every element that makes this collection powerful.
There is no reason the sky has to look one way
and the earth another
They thought they were bombing a carful
of terrorist, bu tactually it was a family filling up
on water bottles
There is no reason your hat can’t hang
on a cow’s ovary
The unvaccinated now inhabit the majority
of ICU beds, leaving heart-attacks, strokes,
and car crash victims to linger in hallways
It’s just a matter of positioning
bending light and twisting time
White people! Don’t put those BLM
posters away just yet when cops resist shots
in the arm but not yet shots to the back
The Surrealists knew all about Einstein
Physics can move mountains
In Haiti, mountains crumble, houses dissolve
governments topple while on the US-Mexico
border, new cities tremble under bridges
The Rockies heave up and walk
on the face of a lavender cat
The governor of California tours yet another oil spill,
says: “This shit is real people,” and doesn’t apologize
for his language or the angry red pulsing in his neck.
Asteroids plummet to earth,
the sky blanketed in starless night
It’s raining frogs again.
Time will only tell how future generations will attempt to understand our current era. Those who would turn to art to make sense of the madness we’ve lived through should look no further than LeMieux’s work. Her poems highlight common themes and contradictions, the ironies and tragedies of living through a pandemic and an era of civil unrest simultaneously. It is through her eyes that readers can come to terms with this bizarre era of history we find ourselves in, for all of its pain and beauty.
© Dotty LeMieux and Ginny Phalen
Dotty LeMieux is the author of four chapbooks, Five Angels (Five Trees Press), Let Us Not Blame Foolish Women (Tombouctou Books), The Land (Smithereens Press), and I Ask Not Good Fortune (Finishing Line Books). She edited the iconic Bolinas literary journal Turkey Buzzard Review in the 1980s, along with the poets and artists of the town. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. Dotty lives in Northern California, where she practices environmental law and helps elect progressive candidates to office.
Ginny Phalen graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County with a Bachelor’s degree in English literature. She has had poems and short stories published in magazines such as Connections and Bartleby and has written for various newspapers, including The Retriever and The Enterprise. She currently lives in Arlington, VA, where she writes in her free time.
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