Common Disaster: Poems

by M. Cynthia Cheung

A remarkable debut collection that chronicles the experience of anxiety and anguish in the face of COVID-19.

As a front-line physician, M. Cynthia Cheung started writing poetry during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her remarkable debut collection, Common Disaster, chronicles these experiences. Confronting not just the coronavirus but also war crimes and the death of loved ones, Cheung shows us that the pandemic is only one of many disasters we hold in common. In poems that look to both the past and future, she takes a stand against the extinction of self and memory, challenging the violence of erasure.

The period covered by the book is geologic and vast. It examines present-day evidence of ancient human activity and natural history, including the Lascaux caves, asteroid craters, tar pits, and Viking ruins. The poems include ghazals, thoughtful free verse, and work that takes up the page in reframing classical Chinese oracular texts to situate the pain of a doctor in crisis.

As a physician-poet, Cheung asks us to see beyond the every day to the devastating truths about the human condition.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published November 15, 2025

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Shelf Awareness review: M. Cynthia Cheung is both a physician and a poet. Her debut collection is a lucid reckoning with everything that could and does go wrong, globally and individually.

Intimate, often firsthand knowledge of human tragedies infuses the verse with melancholy honesty. "We all endure our personal/ disasters," Cheung affirms. Her struggles include the death of her grandmother, also a physician; pregnancy loss; and sandwich-generation concerns for her daughters and ailing mother. She broods on Covid-era failures, too: "I am the doctor who couldn't/ save you."

At the same time, existential threats--war, climate breakdown--are mounting. Recurring references to Chernobyl warn of the cataclysm of nuclear warfare. Scientific vocabulary abounds here, with history providing perspective on current events. Extinction can be gradual or sudden, as with the Chicxulub asteroid, believed to have killed the dinosaurs. Surgeons once practiced transplantation on animals (in "Two-Headed Dog"), and trepanning was an early treatment for depression ("People once drilled holes/ into other people's skulls, just to let/ that darkness out"). Given the pitilessness of nature and militaristic humans, the speaker argues, it is no longer possible to believe in God; "our universe is built like a bomb./ Surely no one still thinks God is listening." Cheung suggests that poetry might now fill the role that religion once played.

Ghazals with repeating end words (including "God," "nowhere," and "exile") reinforce the collection's themes, while "Grotto," an intriguing outlier, employs fairytale allusions, alliteration, and slant rhymes. These remarkable poems gild adversity with compassion and model vigilance during uncertainty.

(Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A smartly researched and poignantly rendered collection of poems, Cheung’s debut poetry book looks unwaveringly at the present moment and beyond. Wonderful to read!

[Susan L. L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

M. Cynthia Cheung's collection, COMMON DISASTER (Acre Books), offers a swath of interwoven personal and collective catastrophes that shake us into recognition of our shared march into love, connection, family, confusion, tragedy, loss, and, finally, the grave. These poems make room for compassion and enlightenment, especially as it relates to our intellectual understanding of a historical past that implicates us all. And what to do with this knowledge? Perhaps, like the speaker of these poems, we might become a little more alive, a little more attentive, a little more daring, in our own inevitable vanishing from this earth.

Also! If you are looking for inventive, teachable poems on the ghazal, this collection is a perfect choice!