Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Dr. Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, professor, medical doctor and author of three books, including Muslim Women Are Everything. She teaches science journalism and global health storytelling at Stanford University, and is the director of the Stanford Health Communications Initiative. Her poetry has appeared in Foundry, The Literary Review, Ruminate and Bateau, and in the anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: Halal If You Hear Me. If God Is A Virus is her first book-length collection of poems.
<p>"Yasmin, a medical doctor who investigated outbreaks for the Epidemic Intelligence Service from the CDC and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, brings considerable experience and a poet’s vision and sense to her depiction of Ebola’s spread through Liberia. To read this work during the coronavirus pandemic is to recognize Yasmin’s prescience, and her ability to unpack how disease intersects with prejudice, race, myth, and poverty." <strong>—<em>The Millions <br />
</em></strong><em>If God is a Virus</em> proves that poetry and public health together make and contain medical language, which makes the language of an epidemic more visible, more veracious. What breaks through is a voice of interiority telling us what’s not told about our bodies and what it means to function.<br />
—<strong>Janice Sapigao</strong>, poet laureate, Santa Clara County, author of <em>like a solid to a shadow</em></p>
<p>In a time of heartbreak and devastation due to the world pandemic, Seema Yasmin’s brilliant <em>If God Is a Virus</em> takes a timely and critical look at disease and its sociopolitical contexts, including multi various forms of domination and hubris: colonization, White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism. This is a necessary book for our times. Read it and be changed. <br />
—<strong>Cathy Linh Che</strong>, author of <em>Split</em>, executive director Kundiman </p>
<p>Seema Yasmin’s fantastic hybrid poetry collection overthrows the dry mindlessness of scientific halls, their power points and false Gods in the face of racism and global domination. God is a virus, and she teaches us to see through data while teaching us to love.<br />
—<strong>Fady Joudah,</strong> author of <em>Tethered to Stars</em></p>
<p>One always wants a poem to have such high stakes, wants a book to feel inevitable, that it couldn't have been written and that no one else but the poet could have written it, so unique to an individual experience it is. Well, this is such a book. And only Seema Yasmin could have written it.<br />
—<strong>Kazim Ali</strong>, author of <em>The Voice of Sheila Chandra</em></p>
<p>In her hands, a sole headline in <em>Scientific American</em> becomes a poem, as does the Hippocratic oath, the Broca's region. Every journalist should read this book, every doctor, every patient. Gird your heart, though, she’s on a mission to break it with her tongue. <br />
—<strong>Lulu Miller,</strong> co-host of Radiolab and author of <em>Why Fish Don't Exist</em></p>
Based on original reporting from West Africa and the United States, and the poet 's experiences as a doctor and journalist, If God Is A Virus charts the course of the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, telling the stories of Ebola survivors, outbreak responders, journalists and the virus itself. Documentary poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, what role the aid industrial complex plays in crises, and how medical myths and rumor can travel faster than microbes.
These poems also give voice to the virus. Eight percent of the human genome is inherited from viruses and the human placenta would not exist without a gene descended from a virus. If God Is A Virus reimagines viruses as givers of life and even authors of a viral-human self-help book.
Merging documentary poetry from the epicenter of an epidemic with the story of viruses in the evolution of humanity, If God Is A Virus gives voice to the infected and the virus.
The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the world. Epidemiology, once the purview of epidemiologists, crisis planners, and medical specialists is now the daily lived reality for all of us.
Through her journalism, regular public and media appearances, and her poetry, Dr. Seema Yasmin has been at the forefront of popularizing a scientifically rigorous approach to public health in general, and to epidemics in particular.
In this book, Yasmin explores the roles of journalists, aid workers and doctors during an infectious crisis, while reimagining the role of viruses in the role of human evolution. She also raises important ethical questions about the role of the poet and the journalist in documenting crises.
Haymarket Books is working with the author and the Pulitzer Center (which has supported Dr. Yasmin 's journalistic work) to generate supplemental curricular materials to accompany the book, allowing it to reach middle and high school students and people who are incarcerated
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Dr. Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, professor, medical doctor and author of three books, including Muslim Women Are Everything. She teaches science journalism and global health storytelling at Stanford University, and is the director of the Stanford Health Communications Initiative. Her poetry has appeared in Foundry, The Literary Review, Ruminate and Bateau, and in the anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: Halal If You Hear Me. If God Is A Virus is her first book-length collection of poems.