Louisa Schnaithmann’s chapbook Plague Love, published by Moonstone Press in 2021, a series of poems about love in the midst of a global pandemic. It is just what a good chapbook should be – tight, cohesive, and powerful. More than that, however, this slim volume is something of an emotional antidote in a world where despair just seems to linger in the atmosphere.
Playful and sensual, honest and unadorned, these poems are refreshingly unapologetic expressions of longing, desire, and affection from one lover to her distant other. Though there are occasional moments of sentimentality, I was repeatedly struck by the uninhibited and expansive emotion in these poems.
From “The Unknown World”
In the unknown world,
each blown kiss
a holy gesture, we love
and love and love.
Reverent as always.
Holding out for tomorrow.
In contemporary poetry, where love so often feels tempered or dampened with sarcasm or grit, I see bravery in such a bold declaration of love.
I was likewise moved by the straightforwardness of “Every Name Has its Power,” which begins simply:
If there is a way
to get out of this
let it be love….
It goes on like that: compact and unadorned, this short poem got me in the gut with the rawness of its longing.
I also really enjoyed the way these poems play with reality and imagination in the use of sensual details. “Social Distancing,” the very first poem in the collection, begins with “A face on a screen–” and ends “The only body I touch is my own”; yet as we move through the poems, the imagery, detailed and visceral, leaves me feeling like these lovers are physically together, even as it’s clear that they’re apart. Consider these lines from “Liminality”:
Even in my dreams, the only
place I touch you…
My arms are your arms
our arms are real,
are the only arms
that will ever exist…
There is a slipperiness here, an intentional incongruity, that allows the reader to share in the emotional experience – desire so powerful, these lovers seem to almost conjure each others’ bodies across space and time. And wow! I am so grateful to have been invited into that: Love. Unironic. Uninhibited.
I will say it again: there is something genuinely brave in writing love poems with the vulnerability we find in Louisa Schnaithmann’s collection. It is, perhaps, the same bravery required to actually be in love – to risk looking foolish or getting hurt for the possibility of making the deepest possible connection. These poems do that. They connect.
In the final poem, “Attention” Schnaithmann writes: “When things lose meaning, the only / thing left is your heart.”
Over the past several years – through elections and changing laws and surging pandemics – meaning has certainly been hard to grab on to. Often it feels like all we can count on for certain are the people in our lives, the people we love. Even when things are difficult and we are distant from each other, the ones we love make us whole and keep us alive. It’s a simple truth, but I am grateful to this collection for reminding me of it.
Autumn Konopka is a writer and teaching artist who enjoys coffee, running, and reggaeton. She's currently working on her first novel, which she expects to publish in early 2023. Find her online: autumnkonopka.com.