Common Disaster

Poems

M. Cynthia Cheung

As a front-line physician, M. Cynthia Cheung started writing poetry during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her remarkable debut collection, Common Disaster, chronicles these experiences. Confronting not just the coronavirus but also war crimes and the death of loved ones, Cheung shows us that the pandemic is only one of many disasters we hold in common. In poems that look to both the past and future, she takes a stand against the exctinction of self and memory, challenging the violence of erasure

The period covered by the book is geologic and vast. It examines present-day evidence of ancient human activity and natural history, including the Lascaux caves, asteroid craters, tar pits, and Viking ruins. The poems include ghazals, thoughtful free verse, and work that takes up the page in reframing classical Chinese oracular texts to situate the pain of a doctor in crisis.

As a physician-poet, Cheung asks us to see beyond the everyday to the devastating truths about the human condition.

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About the Author

M. Cynthia Cheung is an American poet whose work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, swamp pink, and elsewhere. She practices internal medicine in Houston, Texas.

Photo Credit: Kelvin Cheung

Praise for Common Disaster

“The poems of Common Disaster arise with such precision and clarity—extraordinary in their lyric terrains, their veracities of insightful and hard-earned detail, and their many brilliant accomplishments at the level of the line as well as in expansive response to the exigencies of the catastrophic time—that readers will come away from the page replenished, informed, surprised, and even saved by them. Thematically ambitious but never grandiose, formally considered but never formally constrained, M. Cynthia Cheung has been hard at work in the forum of life and death. Her poetics are those of the highest order, arriving with grace and intelligence, substance and vigor, beyond language while also before it. I cannot turn away from these poems, and, with conviction, believe that the poems of Common Disaster will take hold and continue “to carry / all we cannot speak.”
—Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of Ex Machina

“M. Cynthia Cheung has a mind that is wild and vivid and impossible to predict. Here, Cheung meditates on the complexities of dying in hospital, on the indignities and hopes of the helpless, on the dailiness of mortal threat. Here, also, she considers a horrifying sand burial near Sutton Hoo, or the mind of Charles Darwin, or the experience of a world-obliterating meteor sixty-six million years ago. Here is a two-headed dog and the origins of transplant surgery and here are the living wolves at Chernobyl. Common Disaster is a book of great technical skill, craftsmanship, and variety, a book obsessed not only with witnessing history and daily life, but finding in them the profoundly human truths—the facts of mortality, of environment, of family, and of love. This is a terrific first book, one I will return to with great pleasure.”
—Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears