If God is A Virus: Poems (BreakBeat Poets Series)

Based on original reporting from West Africa and the United States, and the poet’s experiences as a doctor and journalist, If God Is A Virus charts the course of the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, telling the stories of Ebola survivors, outbreak responders, journalists and the virus itself. Documentary poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, what role the aid industrial complex plays in crises, and how medical myths and rumor can travel faster than microbes. These poems also give voice to the virus. Eight percent of the human genome is inherited from viruses and the human placenta would not exist without a gene descended from a virus. If God Is A Virus reimagines viruses as givers of life and even authors of a viral-human self-help book. These poems are a testament to sitting with strata about how people are treated and rendered erroneously in reports and studies, in appointments, in racist texts, and in people’s limited and grotesque imaginations and medical practices where life and death are a matter of words. Her work proves that poetry and public health together make and contain medical language, which makes the language of an epidemic more visible, more veracious. Every page has its own rhythm–some as odes to women in her lineage, others as a pathology of public collapse. What breaks through is a voice of interiority telling us what’s not told about our bodies and what it means to function. — Janice Lobo Sapigao, poet laureate, Santa Clara County, author of like a solid to a shadow