A Different Distance

In Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr's A Difference Distance, the authors use the Japanese form of the renga to explore the routines, claustrophobia, digressions, and slippery conclusions of the pandemic. Writing from Paris, where they both live, each just a few miles from the other’s home, Hacker and Naïr brilliantly use the repetition and recontextualization of the renga form to transmute the unnaturally bright April horizons, and the nameless figures and faces that make up the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis. There is much beauty and playfulness in the language to comment upon, but I found myself reading this collaborative poem for its take on the weather and the atmospheres, on how, under lockdown, furniture shapes one’s mood, how a forgotten “old squat black CD player” suddenly feels alive with memories and nostalgia. In one poem, Naïr writes of the sun’s spotlighting power. But the book also considers the climate indoors, as Hacker notes in a poem describing routines of quarantine: another “hot bath” and the changing of bed linens. The book “travels” with tales of loved ones in Rio, Toulouse, Moscow, and through virtual spaces such as Crowdcast that acts as an “isle of brief joy,” or YouTube as it streams a funeral. The book asks us to consider place and detachment, intimacy and friendship, and also, what is morning if one has nowhere to go. A Different Distance marks the pandemic era with rich complexity and without any voyeurism, capturing the exact temporality of this durational crisis. I hope that future readers will return to this work for years to come to understand something not only of isolation, but also to learn about seasons, time of day, and about how one can summon presence even in the long absence of another.