**On Common Disaster by M. Cynthia Cheung**

by Tyler Truman Julian

Common Disaster by M. Cynthia Cheung seeks to humanize those who are often expected to “keep a stiff upper lip” in the face of disaster. By interrogating what it means to be a doctor in a post-COVID world, the speaker explores personal and societal disasters through the lens of a medical background. Equally confessional and structurally complex, the poems of Common Disaster—even with their attention to scientific detail—are neither esoteric nor didactic; rather, Cheung’s speaker pulls back the veil on keenly human reactions to our present moment.

The collection opens with “Boreal Time,” a prose poem that distills eons down to the present moment. Cheung establishes the modern era of environmental degradation and disaster, writing,

To have evolved. To survive the retreat of glaciers...To make a mollusk’s last
stand…Each breath, the present. More bodies gliding silently over leaf litter. To follow
the deepest instinct. To converge. They cannot hear the jet trail miles above. They do not
look up. Translucent eggs exquisite and hibernal, not questioning, not demanding. To
exist where everything melts.

Cheung uses primitive life to illuminate humanity’s persistent existence in the fraught present moment, and this poem sets the scene for the more personal poems that build across the collection. For example, the next poem is “Ghazal.” While ghazals often explore romantic loss, the subject here is not any one individual, but humanity as a whole, “archaic men capable of thought, of transforming / silence—the inner world—into dark holograms of themselves,” “our ancestors.” This poem, reflecting on early human cave paintings, ultimately asks a valuable, framing question for our present-day calamity: “Should we act surprised we’ve always been ourselves?”

These poems, honing in on human struggle, continue to zoom in on the confessional “I,” the speaker, as the collection progresses:

            When I was six, I unfolded an artist’s
           rendition of the solar system from the center
            of an old National Geographic and discovered
            that the sun would dilate within five billion years and overtake
            the Earth. I couldn’t decide which was worse—this
or extinction.

(“I Have Seen My Death”)

“I Have Seen My Death” explores different types of loss, but the poem hangs on the framework established in “Boreal Time” and “Ghazal.” From there, the poem transitions the collection into further personal, human disaster. In “Common Disaster No. 1,” the speaker explores the loss of her grandmother, pages and pages later, “Common Disaster No. 2” chronicles the death of a patient, and “Common Disaster No. 3” declares, “In reality, we all endure our personal / disasters.”

These three powerful poems are interspersed between lyric and confessional moments, poems exploring geological time, and political reflections. Common Disaster is post-pandemic American poetry at its finest. “The Yijing: a pandemic apocrypha” embraces an abstract narrative structure, capturing the fractured and confused feelings so many experienced at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, though again filtered through the eyes of a doctor poet-speaker:

                                    the papers are making much
                        of the CDC’s statement
                                                                        in a crisis

what do we do with those doctors and nurses

            is it seven days                        or five                                                 or zero
                                                                                                nobody has really defined
                                                                                    a crisis

Cheung’s speaker—with her understanding of biology and human history—argues that crisis is universal, but each individual’s response to the crisis is unique, and this makes a coherent, collective response difficult. Perhaps the only constant is change, and the speaker encourages adaption amid crisis and change:
            There’s a crow that likes to sit on the streetlamp
            right outside the hospital’s entrance. He is sleek,
            indifferent. A few months ago, I would have wanted
            to kill him.

(“Common Disaster No. 2”)

The speaker’s personal change seems to reflect a larger message that adaptation allows for survival, and human adaptability could result in a more just and integrated world. By sharing her personal experience, coupled with universal scientific language and relatable situations, Cheung’s speaker becomes a credible guide through crisis.

Common Disaster is a timely collection, offering reflection and guidance for the crises experienced in common, both large and small. With an ethos born of personal experience and a refusal to set aside medical knowledge, the speaker of Common Disaster leads Cheung’s readers to reflection. Across this collection, readers must grapple with history—both recent and ancient—and attempt to understand the contexts that shape their responses to crisis. Yet, they do not do it alone; Cheung reminds readers that we are in this together and resilience is a necessary trait if we want to survive and thrive.

In case you missed them—here are Cheung’s poems from The Shore:
Forms of Water
Two-Headed Dog