Praise for The Optimist Shelters in Place:

Kimberly Ann Priest’s The Optimist Shelters in Place embraces love and grief through the lens of collective tragedy and the lived experience of a woman alone, attempting to steady self by tending plants and to-do lists and maintaining bonds with her grown kids over FaceTime. By repeating “The Optimist” in each title as an anaphoric echo of daily routines, and by insisting on distance from a constructed self via the 3rd person POV, these neo-confessional poems balance the ache of imagining families “sobbing” in hospital parking lots with the personal loss of long isolation, the fresh finality of divorce, and even the tedious need to clean the shower. 

—Lisa Fay Coutley, tether 

The Optimist Shelters in Place is a deeply moving chapbook reminding us that COVID-19 is more than a pandemic of illness—it is a pandemic of loneliness, too. The protagonist of these poems wrestles with the painful isolation of quarantine. She makes obsessive lists, distracts herself with social media, even assembles the outfit she wants to die in and lays it out “in the shape of a body on the seldom used guest bed.” But rather than choosing despair, she faces each day with empathy and humor, expressing tenderness and compassion—toward her children, her houseplants, people suffering all over the world, and people in her past who have hurt her. This remarkable book is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand our historical moment—what it feels like to live in it and what it means to make the choice, day after day, to keep living through it. 

—Jeffrey Bean, Woman Putting on Pearls

In her stellar and deeply relatable collection, poet Kimberly Ann Priest reveals the loneliness of a single American divorcee who is suddenly isolated in a pandemic-ravaged world. Full of grief and desperation, she recounts her coping strategies: “She has lists . . . types of dogs she prefers for companions / professional opportunities she hopes to take advantage of should there ever be an opportunity . . . the names of flowers, too / as well as the things her family should have said to her after the divorce” and tries, exhaustively, to stay connected to the outside world via social media. Revealing the underlying sorrow that many of our “joyful” posts attempt to mask, this collection also shows our constant need to conjure hope in the wake of tragedy as she imagines that: in a hospital “[s]omewhere a young man wakes / the wheels / of his bed suggesting direction / grey skies outside his window—promising.”

—Meghan Sterling, These Few Seeds