Dodging Cliché in Shared Experience: A Look at Stacy Boe Miller’s “Quarantine”
There is no shortage of Covid pandemic poems, so if you’re going to write one, it has to be singular. Too many quarantine poems feel emotionally pre-decided–just similar accounts of “this is what happened” built from an inventory of familiar images: masks, Zoom calls, sourdough starters, empty streets. While these poems may capture the absurdity of the shared experience of quarantine, the work of recognition stops there.
Miller’s poem is not a description of quarantine, but an account of a consciousness under quarantine.
“The me in the mirror
says, You are
a woman. The me
in the room asks When
did I stop being
rain?”
The juxtaposition of the speaker’s fixed identity in the mirror with the fluidity of rain is such a striking image because she isn’t mourning youth or girlhood so much as a mode of existence that once felt boundaryless before Covid. The mirror offers a concrete identity while the speaker remembers herself as something more elemental and unfixed. I admire the trust Miller places in her lines without overexplaining or collapsing it into a singular idea of meaning. And because of that, readers may recognize different losses: sensuality, movement, creativity, permeability, or even maybe just the simple freedom of walking down both sides of the grocery store aisle.
Quarantine shrank our lives until the simplest things felt sacred: “A miracle my egg sandwich / this morning.” I love how radically specific this image is, existing right alongside the speaker’s fragmented sense of self. Quarantine recalibrated our attention in this way, didn’t it? One minute we were experiencing profound anxiety, loneliness, despair or estrangement; the next, an almost comically ordinary domestic object was a source of astonishment.
I think what I love most about Miller’s Quarantine is its resistance to self-importance. Even at its most lyrical, she trusts awkwardness, plainness, and physical reality:
“Somewhere
My mother drinks
tawny port and counts
her years. Knees hurt
sometimes. And chests.”
Miller never asks her perceptions to bear more meaning than they naturally can. Instead, she allows ordinary experience to accumulate its own emotional gravity. Because she resists elevating every perception into profound revelation, the moments that do achieve lyric intensity feel earned rather than imposed. That restraint is what allows the poem to arrive at something more difficult and more enduring: an atmospheric hurt, shared and suspended between people. That is the feeling of “waiting” I remember from quarantine, and Miller nails it with brilliant, understated wisdom.
