Common Disaster delves into many planes, including our personal and collective awareness of life and death and what constitutes disaster.

I don’t have fond memories of hospitals. The distinct smell reminds me of the hours I’ve spent visiting, watching blood being drawn, and of the many relatives and cousins whose burials I’ve taken part in. Cheung situates Common Disaster to show the small and sometimes silent interactions that transpire in a person’s last moments, conveying how heartbreaking they are, but also presenting with the compassion these passages to a state beyond fear. In this collection, the notion of death is more about the uncertainty than the pain. Through the lenses of the witnesses, I get a glimpse into the therapeutic quality of the natural world and how it directly and metaphorically signifies what makes us human – love and compassion.

I never thought I’d be describing a book with disaster in its title as beautiful. But that is the least of what can be said about the nuanced voices and perspectives in Cheung’s debut volume. In the pages of this book, ghazals are employed strategically, as a way of magnifying and creating reverberations of last words that medical personnel hear before losing a patient. I have written poems about death myself, but most often from cultural and spiritual perspectives. Common Disaster expands the conversation about the poetics of grief, death, and elegy with its inclusion of the voices of the dying, who are kept alive through these rare poems.

Common Disaster in fact begins with a ghazal, a form that depends, among other things, on the rhyming and repetitive nature at the tail of each line. This decision deliberately centralizes the hospital, treating it as a portal from which human beings may enter or exit this world. Many poems in this book left me questioning my relationship to life, enhanced my appreciation of darkness, foxes, crows, the moon, and the natural world, all of which both magnify and fine tune human experience.

The poems in Common Disaster have been exquisitely refined, leaving gems that will continue to glitter with time.

Hussain Ahmed, Assistant Editor