Praise for "This Costly Season"
Urgent, improvisatory, diaristic—John Okrent’s well-crafted crown of sonnets about being a doctor during the pandemic, our pandemic, is unexpected and necessary, compulsively readable, haunting and hallucinatory. There is something both very ancient and very new about these eloquent, interlocking poems of worry, illness, supplication, and praise.
--Edward Hirsch
Like Petrarch, Keats, and Whitman, whose influence undertows these poems, John Okrent is a poet who explores the metaphysics of mortality under pressure.
--Erin Belieu
John Okrent’s magnificent crown of sonnets imbues the form with energy, empathy and surprise. His approach to the world is all-encompassing and humane... the sequence seems like a prayer, the prayer of one who feels blessed by life on earth.
--John Skoyles
This is a miracle collection and each one of these poems is a long slow kiss into the face of oblivion as they slam it to the dirt and kick its ass.
--Matthew Lippman
In trying again and again to steady us, and in truthfully, beautifully, failing, these lines give us embodied access to some of the wildest, most powerful human virtues, like fortitude and optimism, faith and dignity.
--Katie Peterson