Quarantine Highway

Millicent Borges Accardi

In Quarantine Highway, Millicent Borges Accardi guides us through the contemplative instances we explore in the loneliest parts of the pandemic with moving imagery and reminders of how to cope and recreate ourselves. In these poems, we reflect on healing, grieve on a lost year, dream of wildfires, and “tooth it out” beyond our anxieties of being undone. We pray to the “temple of our tragedy” and dance alone with small moments of liberation. Like breaking bread and memorizing trees, Accardi’s poems step past comets that blast loneliness and cracks in the sidewalk from our childhood in order to help us rediscover all the connections we’ve missed.

Juan J. Morales

Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi is one of those poetry books that one returns to again and again. Our everyday lives, challenges, and hopes are summed into a poetic language that questions and liberates. Our ancestral ties and our daily occurrences are juxtaposed in a perfect symbiosis. Although we “stretched apart like a knitted cloth,” this collection brings us together through shared experiences and collective expectations.

Diniz Borges

They Belong Perhaps to Other Worlds

from a line by José

Tolentino Mendonça

Seeing a new range in which to live, we plead, we engage, we bow, we know, we realize, as if wishing were a political cliché.

There is so much to enquire and consume. We order from Good Eats and Door Dash, and wipe off the plastic bags and cardboard,

Seeming like we were advocates for begging how to differ or comment on an opinion. To reflect, my god, to vanish. We pray and we dream, to dominate, born only to distinguish, our weird worldly support system gone, all, within six feet of social distance and water droplets.

In Quarantine Highway, by Millicent Borges Accardi