Five Essays from 'Present Continuous'

by David Grundy

"The five essays printed here are excerpted from Part I of "Present Continuous," a book of prose written during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic between March 2020 and April 2021 in Lewisham, London. The essays in the present volume were written between March 2020 and June 2020: the movement from spring to summer, from the first announcement of a national lockdown to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States and the death of Belly Mujinga in the UK. Nearly two years on, following a seemingly endless series of virus variants and subvariants, an apparent shift from pandemic to endemic, and a kind of exhaustion of vocabulary and will, I hope they provide some sort of record, not just of where "we" were in 2020, but where "we" are - or might be - now." (David Grundy, London, January 2022)

74 pages, Paperback

Published April 6, 2022

About the author

David Grundy is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944—Present (Oxford University Press, 2024) and coeditor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He co-runs the poetry small press Materials/Materialien.