Pamela L. Sumners’s poem “(Supposing) My Mother Was a Blue Heron” has been nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize by Seven Kitchens Press

—ETIQUETTE FOR A PANDEMIC—

“So, too, we find Pamela Sumners’s Etiquette for a Pandemic & Other Social Distancing Protocols compelling, timely, crisply original, daringly challenging and, at once, powerfully charming. It is, in fact, unlike any volume of poetry we’ve encountered.”
—Bill Burtis, Hole in the Head Review.

Pamela L. Sumners is a poet who takes few prisoners. In this volume of poems conceived as a response to the COVID Pandemic, Sumners writes of subjects as diverse as Daylight Saving Time, crows, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and games of truth or dare with an acerbic wit that belies her serious-ness. She has a rare gift for metaphors that surprise, ’cause of death’ as ‘a cessation of birthdays’ for instance, but she also has a gift for piling up metaphors that is hard to illustrate–look for it in her poems; though here’s one: ‘the Governor of this the Show-Me bone-headed literalist state,’ skewering Missouri, its governor, and its bible-thumping legislators all at once.

Sumners is also well known for her constitutional and civil rights legal work, including cases opposing Donald Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow, Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore, Supreme Court wannabe Bill Pryor, and an Alabama governor who argued that the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to Alabama. A native Alabamian, she now lives in St. Louis with her wife, son, and rescue dogs.

Of this collection, Sumners notes in the volume’s opening pages,

All the poems in this slim volume address the distances between people. They reflect the impact of disease on us as well as our dis-ease with each other, the distances we keep, and whether we try to close them, even with our lovers. This, at least is what I hope I have explored with a raw, sometimes provocatively evasive, even pathetically inadequate intention.

Readers of Etiquette for a Pandemic may well find the author’s ‘intention’ more than adequate. All the poems in this collection are memorable, but out of a few that may be more than memorable, one might select “This Time Last year” for its sheer loveliness as well as its encyclopedic knowledge of neighborhood birds, and “A Brief History of Blue” for its stunning account of the history of what one suspects is the author’s favorite color. This is a collection to be treasured. Available from Amazon.

Pamela L. Sumners is the author of two more poetry collections, Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones, available from Uncollected Press, and a chapbook, Finding Helen, available from Seven Kitchens Press.