Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi Reviewed By Kristy Snedden

“Washed over our souls with Clorox,” a Review of Quarantine Highway, Millicent Borges Accardi’s Collection of Poetry From the Pandemic

By Kristy Snedden

In Quarantine Highway, Accardi creates a word tableau to encompass the Corona Virus Pandemic, the wildfires, the political unrest, and her personal experiences. Accardi is Portuguese American and uses poetic lines from other Portuguese poets throughout this collection. These line-prompts are an offering of connection to poets from the countries that reside within the Portuguese​ diaspora, and they offer the reader a backdrop to Accardi’s poetry which focuses on the isolation, fear, separation, loneliness, loss, and the struggle for connection that are emblematic of the pandemic.

This is a collection that is fearless in its depiction of the pandemic as an existential trauma that no one could escape. The author’s use of first-person plural invites the reader into her experience. These poems will bring back the emotions of fear, uncertainty, and loss that characterized the early days of the corona virus. 

The poems are arranged like a highway, a string of poems that take the reader on a long journey through time while touching on the many themes mentioned above. When Accardi ends “To Miss the Shadow” with “Do you / remember that time when we held everything / in our arms tightly, as if we knew what we were talking about” the sense of loss is palpable. In “Bread” she takes us back to the early bleak days when she says, “I tell you – we were bleeding / as we went out to get cardboard / boxes in the rain and washed / over our souls with Clorox. / It was flinging a flung / while we tried to fly again. / To break bread, crusty and warm... / …We are shook and shaken / and looking for fever. For signs. / and it is all entirely unmanageable.” Accardi’s poetry abounds with alliteration. Her skillful use of enjambment and tight word structure gives the illusion that we are reading the same poem over and over again, reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic when one day ran into the next and it was difficult to anchor events in sequential time.

In “For Truth would be from a Line,” Accardi writes of the struggles to trust with, “For truth would have / to be untouchable, / like a hand we used to know, / to hold-- /as if it were our own… / …fumbling along thru / this magnificent universe we kind of / know, or at least pretended it to be so” and in “It’s Almost Dark,” she continues with, “like the years we knew / outside confinement had / mushroomed away / Like a stark vision on the horizon / as we watch the sun go down.”

There are many  moments to savor in these poems.  In “The Right Measure of their Agony”, the title is an integral part of the poem which reads, “The Right Measure of their Agony // Was cross-stitched into an under-belly of a soul no one prayed to” and the last line (a long enjambed sentence) ends with “… We agreed / to the word double-life as we ventured on the fire escape and we were solid, unbreakable / and under the age of 30, with that unfinished feeling that troubled us, / like not knowing your lucky number.” These are lines that will stay with you.

In the second half of this collection, Accardi brings in more material about her experience as an immigrant. The reader can quickly make connections between the immigrant experience of aloneness and uncertainty and the individual’s experience of aloneness and uncertainty during the Pandemic. Processing the poems in the second half of the collection brings the reader out of the almost dissociative experience of the quarantine days by grounding us in the immigrant experience. In “Days I Walked Home from School,” Accardi writes, “…It was all scary, pretending to / be all right / …It was that way and the counselors told me that / I liked to read and there were libraries, / and I liked to read.” 

In “Unlearning America’s Languages,”  Accardi’s choice of words, line breaks, and unusual juxtapositions inform non-immigrants of the immigrant experience as she writes, “…the generation where we were form- / fitted into a dress of forgetting / language culture, food, Fit in Fit in Fit in / disappear into America and all of its joys / and death threats … / …Let’s wait / quietly / before the others speak and never let on / the name of your street or where your family / came from and that was and is how it was … / … we lie in bed and draw words in the air, spelling / out where we came from.

Perhaps my favorite poem in this collection, “More Than us, but Less than Wind,”  is full of everything I admire about Accardi’s writing with lines like, “migration, immigration, destiny. / The scattering of people, traveling / away from where they were born, / … Dragging culture across grassy fields, / dragging language around like a knapsack, emptying familiar phrases as if they were bread / crumbs along the way… / … How much of / ourselves do we remain within our leaving hearts, // the gateway to our lives, our rabbit’s foot, the pelt worn down to bone and dried blood that / we finger in our nearly closed fist / when we are scared.” WOW! 

The final poems suggest hope and a desire for healing – both as individuals and collectively. This collection is not for the reader who wants to forget the quarantine or ignore the social unrest that the virus laid bare. But if you are a reader who lives an embodied life, a human being who wants to understand and be understood on the highway of life, these poems will enrich your journey.

To learn more about Millicent Borges Accardi, visit her website at https://www.millicentborgesaccardi.com.

​