Millicent Borges Accardi’s Quarantine Highway
Unpleasant Memories and Hope for the Future: A Review of Millicent Borges Accardi’s Quarantine Highway by Collin White
In the spring of 2021, I sealed myself inside of the cramped bedroom I called home due to an unfortunate sore throat. I couldn't get tested for Covid because antigen tests weren’t widely available yet, and I had to make an appointment for a drive-in test at our local hospital. My only option to keep the immediate family I lived with safe was to quarantine myself within our house, which was already under quarantine, while the nation stayed indoors.
I had, for the most part, forgotten this unpleasant memory from an unpleasant time until encountering Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi. In her new collection from Flowersong Press, Accardi invites us back into the memories that many of us are still trying to ignore, putting our shared cultural trauma under the lens of examination. The book includes poems by the writer and a host of other contributors.
Accardi has authored three other poetry collections: Through a Grainy Landscape, Injuring Eternity, and Only More So. Quarantine Highway received an Honorable Mention for The Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award at the Latino Boook Awards 2023. Accardi has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts (NEA), CantoMundo, Fulbright, the California Arts Council, Barbara Deming Foundation, Fundação Luso-Americana, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC, and Formby at the Special Collections Library at Texas Tech. Her work appears in many journals, including this one.
The first piece in the collection,“Broken Pieces,” introduces us to the tone of the collection, but for me it was the second piece, “To Miss the Shadow,” that drew me into the book. Accardi’s vivid language here is very evocative of the emotions I felt during the pandemic; the poet’s use of alliteration and repetition draws attention to the difficult feelings we all had to live through. One of my favorite sections of this poem are lines five through ten, as it pulls back to an almost stereotypical scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a television series from the 70s:
No breathing out in the alley
like the tall grass they used to cut back
in the olden days when neighbors
talked over the fence at each other.
And, it was OK with God to like family.
References to a pre-pandemic world are as significant as the time of quarantine in the book, coming up in the poems “Before She Consumes It" and in “It’s Almost Dark.” These pieces are all the stronger because of the contrast between the world we lived through starting in 2020 and our lives before; the poem gives meaning to the struggle we’ve gone through.
On the first pass, Quarantine Highway can feel a little front-loaded, as most of Accardi's own work populates the first half of the collection. But upon return readings, I appreciated the fact that these poems prepare the reader for the different styles of writing to come. Although my usual approach to collections of poetry is to flip the book open and read wherever I happen to land, I took a linear path through Quarantine Highway, an approach I recommend if you, like me, are a serial skipper.
Another feature that strengthens this collection is the unity of the themes within each and every piece; no single piece feels out of place while also displaying the wide range of unique voices. Two poems standouts include “My Body Is Flame” by Irene Lara Silva and “Killing too Much Meat to Carry” By Juan Morales. I appreciate the writers’ brave and proud approaches to the pain of solitude and the focus on the perseverance we were all forced to demonstrate.
I believe this united theme is where this collection's greatest strength lies, but it is also what I could see many struggling with when engaging Quarantine Highway. It is, admittedly, difficult to go back to the same mental space we were in during the worst of the quarantine; it can be exhausting to go through many of the same emotions, some of which we don’t want to admit we still have to endure today. I was not prepared to remember the week I was restricted my cramped bedroom, but in doing so, I realized that recollection is necessary for recovery.
It might be true that Americans want to continue with their lives and forget about the trauma we shared, but in doing so we ignore the symptoms of a greater problem—one that might again result in a poorly-handled pandemic. It’s important to ensure that our current climate allows for the creation of miracle vaccines and pushes back against those who deny the plague that created the necessity for them. This is not poetry about Covid or the quarantine itself, but rather about the conflict within ourselves—one that we all felt during the worst of the worst of that period. I will likely be returning to this collection again in the near future because what it is here is not just painful recollection, but also hope for survival.
If this review has piqued your interest, the paperback of Quarantine Highway can be picked up from Flowersong Press. If you can go back to a time nobody wishes happened, I highly recommend giving this collection a read.