“Night’s Lightless Chokehold”: A Review of Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul

Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul

by Ann E. Wallace

Kelsay Books, March 12, 2024

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Ann E. Wallace creates a harrowing tale of motherhood in her second collection of poetry, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul. Her collection moves like a journal, with poetry entries dated from 2020 to 2023, commencing with her and her two teenage daughters contracting COVID. Wallace’s case was acute, and, unfortunately, both she and one of her daughters developed long COVID. As Wallace details their struggles, she pays homage to guiding and letting go of teenage daughters as they head toward adulthood and an altered world outside the house where they sheltered. 

In addition to being a poet and parent, Wallace is the 2023–2024 Poet Laureate of Jersey City and Professor of English at New Jersey City University. She is also the host and producer of The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants, by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. Wallace has previously drawn inspiration from illness and motherhood, such as in her first collection of poetry, Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag Press). Her earlier book weaves in poems about navigating ovarian cancer and multiple sclerosis. 

Like Wallace, I have survived cancer and have chronic illnesses, including myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The symptoms of long COVID and ME/CFS are very similar. Since my spouse has also survived cancer and heart bypass surgery, I know about sealing everything off to care for my family while I’m sick. I, too, have been in the lonely house on the cover of Days of Grace and Silence, fearing my household might be swallowed by a sand dune or ocean. I, like Wallace, broke the isolation by writing. 

Wallace’s date-stamped poems begin with daily intervals of time, then gradually shift to larger swaths of time, and ultimately have gaps in time as Wallace relapses with COVID. She takes readers from the urgency of surviving one minute to the next during acute COVID into a changed world and an altered perspective affected by chronic illness, middle age, and daughters readying to enter adulthood. “Each of us has suffered, suffers still, has grieved, / in our own way, behind closed doors or before eyes / that do not see,” Wallace laments in her prologue poem, “The Porches of Strangers.”

She sands parenthood down to its essentials: stay alive, protect the children and the self, even if it means keeping watch while separated by walls. In the collection’s first section, “Days of Pressure and Fog,” Wallace brings readers into her battle to breathe during her acute assault of COVID. She hears her daughter’s dry cough from another room. With the start of her eldest daughter’s symptoms, Wallace “gathered her and her sister, pulled / the door shut behind us and spun / a soft space where we might keep safe.” The image reminds me of when my husband’s mild heart attack symptoms started. I immediately banished out-of-town guests. Following his bypass surgery, home became his intensive care room, where only his nurse and I were allowed. Even flowers from a friend were too dangerous to have nearby. Rest and quiet were everything. Images of safe nesting spaces, such as eggs and the house itself, recur in Wallace’s collection. These enclosed spaces are restorative and fiercely guarded by the caregiver. 

But sheltering within a tightly sealed small house, street sounds muffled except for sirens, the poet finds sound and alarm are amplified:

The poet’s distress is profound, palpable, much like my own when my husband’s heart was stopped during bypass surgery. A nurse called from the operating room to let me know when that happened and when his heart was restarted again. All I could do in the interval was wait, pray, and try to keep breathing. “Long breathless / weeks” in a “night’s lightless chokehold” of keeping watch of her two daughters profoundly ghosts the rest of Wallace’s collection.

Breathing with acute COVID brings excruciating pain. Wallace makes real and metaphorical the burning pain of breathing in, described as like swallowing fire:

At times she counts to four. Sometimes she blacks out. There is danger:

Rhythms, short lines like these, and spacing, such as in the masterful arrangement of words and lines shimmering across the poem “Airborne,” disorder readers’ breathing. I can see this on the page and feel it in my own body as I read the poem. I feel the press and release of disordered breathing take over at night, such as in the poems, “Night Breathing” and “Every Night Interminable.” Implicit in her lines is the threat of not returning to daily life, “Darkness and oxygen run low / in tandem by night, / as the pressure grows fierce.” The next morning, there is a “circling    into dawn” with Wallace’s labored breathing. The extra space in the line suggests how close she is to not taking the next breath, her exhale suspended for a moment, then relief, similar to what I felt in my husband’s hospital room when morning light streaked the window, signaling we’d survived the night.

“Chest X-Ray with COVID” is shaped like the lungs, different formatting used for each lung to reveal more white space and compression on the right side. The poem’s form suggests scarring, constriction, and damage in the right lung, while the left lung appears to be working smoothly. The dire situation is clear, the damage (if you do survive), life-altering, “I fight not just for air, / but for words, for logic, / for narrative.” This is not a fight the poet wants to have with brain fog, the lingering condition of many post-infectious illnesses. I’m deeply grateful for these poems, especially as a writer with ME/CFS who has faced skepticism when I try to explain brain fog or severe fatigue, often while in the midst of experiencing both.

During this time when she is pulled into the house and into her own body, Wallace must watch over her teenage daughters. I sensed my husband felt the same tension as he was wheeled into surgery, worried about me but needing to focus on his own life. We had recently moved to a new city where we didn’t know anyone, and my undiagnosed ME/CFS symptoms were worsening. For Wallace, it’s not the first time she has balanced relationships and illness. She has survived ovarian cancer, lived with multiple sclerosis and a third illness mentioned but not named. But this sickness is different—one of being tethered to her daughters who also become seriously ill. When Wallace and her oldest daughter both develop long COVID, it binds them in sickness long term. “Ties That Bind” movingly describes mother and daughter interconnectedness, “This illness breaks me / into three tied and tattered / threads—mine, hers, theirs.” 

In “The Empty Casing,” Wallace discovers a tiny swallowtail egg on the same back porch where she describes the memory of her water breaking in “August Sun,” reminding her of life’s fragile nature. Despite serious illness and delays from the pandemic pause, her teens are poised to push off. In “Not Yet, Abby,” the youngest daughter tests danger by going onto the fire escape, not to take off, but to get some much-needed fresh air and space. Wallace poignantly realizes she dealt with her previous illnesses in a more self-focused way that didn’t prepare her to help her daughters, and she grapples with how to do that now. Still, her protective instinct is revealed in the title of “Not Yet, Abby,” and Wallace’s poems show there was nothing special to prepare. She was always helping them, even when gasping for air. 

While Wallace pays homage to the kindnesses she receives, “a stream of love, / of care, has flowed to my small and quiet place,” the frays in the social fabric outside her home have been exposed by the pandemic. The world she and her daughters find when they step outside again swirls with danger, including denial of the pandemic’s lessons: 

Inside the house, like an egg, mother and daughters find protection, recovery, incubation, tending, bringing forth, and readying for what’s next. They shelter each other, much like my husband and I, even when seriously ill. And, like Wallace’s poems, we shift to a seasonal passage of time, and the cycles of life reset. Days of Grace and Silence offers hard-won lessons: focus less on doing, more on simply being, unplugging, taking in nature, forgetting to-do lists; breathing and being present are the biggest gifts we can give loved ones. Allowing them to thrive despite our fears is the next-biggest gift. Wallace discerns a new order to navigate, but after reading Days of Grace and Silence, I head out, sheltered and comforted by knowing all this. I am certain her daughters do, too.