“Personally, I was deeply affected during the pandemic because my grandmother (who lives in America) came down with the virus. This was a big scare to me and my family and I got really worried. The thing was that we could not even travel to her to help her and even if we could, we would have a massive chance of getting the virus ourselves.”
“…I spread wide my arms,
stretch heart skyward
breathe deeply under
overarching boughs
and open my eyes
to a small universe
of grey-brown spheres
gently swaying
midst the frenzied
feeding,
each one so like a
tiny spiky
Death Star—
a perfect
wooden replica
of a COVID-19 cell…”
“…in the second week of March, just before New Zealand shut their borders to non-citizens (which includes my husband, although he grew up in New Zealand), my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. We decided to wait and see what initial test results suggested in terms of prognosis, before booking flights to fly over. By then it was too late […] He died in mid April, before we could see him again…”
“Of course those on high incomes feel like their throats have been cut, but it’s been a godsend for the low paid, young people and typically marginalised.”
“I didn’t want to mention toilet paper but I think that might be the biggest story of this whole event. Shortages started to happen before the virus even arrived in Australia.”
Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA),
Stanford University
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