The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
4 — Wednesday, February 23, 2022

POETRY HAS THE ability to give us 
strength in our darkest times and reflect 
our joy in our happiest moments. For 
evidence, just look at the outpouring of 
gratitude for Amanda Gorman — Presi-
dent Biden’s inaugural poet — and the 
virality of her poem “The Hill We Climb.” 
The line “For there is always light, if only 
we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re 
brave enough to be it,” seemed to encom-
pass both the despair and the hope so 
many Americans were feeling on that 
day, just two weeks after armed rioters 
stormed the capitol. That is the power 
of poetry. So if you feel like you’re living 
through an apocalypse — the seemingly 
never-ending COVID-19 pandemic, polit-
ical turmoil, deep divides in American 
society, threat of war, climate change, 
police brutality, a collective mental 
health crisis or whatever other calamity 
you can think of — here’s some poetry to 
help carry you through.
“Dearly” by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is perhaps best 
known for her 1985 novel “The Hand-

maid’s Tale,” a searing criticism of 
Western rape culture and restrictions 
on reproductive freedom. She turns that 
same keen eye to her poetry — though in 
the several decades that have passed, it 
has been molded, not dulled, by age’s wis-
dom. Now 82, Atwood speaks to today’s 
crises in her most recent poetry collec-
tion, “Dearly,” with both her character-
istic wit and anger and a sort of gentle, 
pleading hope. Her poetry encapsulates 
what this era is and could become: the 
ongoing fight for women’s rights, the 
looming climate catastrophe, the grief of 
losing a loved one and our current politi-
cal situation. But despite its heavy topics, 
her poetry does not produce a helpless 
feeling; instead, it makes you want to 
fight even more.
“What the Living Do” by Marie 
Howe
“What the Living Do” tells the frag-
mented story of youth, how our child-
hoods shape us into who we are and 
how we come to learn what living is 
all about. Written for her brother, who 
died of AIDS-related complications in 
1989, “What the Living Do” is imbued 
with a sense of wonder for life — all of 
its pain and joy and in-betweens. It does 

not attempt to make everything rosy; it 
knows how difficult this all is, how tiring 
it can be to keep going day after day with 
the small frustrations and regrets piling 
up. But it also shines light onto the under-
side, the part that we often let collect dust 
as we alternate between slogging away 
and sleeping: the heartwrenching beauty 
of this short, short time we have together. 
Howe’s poetry speaks best for itself: “We 
want the spring to come and the winter to 
pass. / We want / whoever to call or not 
call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and 
more and then / more of it. / But there 
are moments, walking, when I catch a 
glimpse of myself in the / window glass, / 
say, the window of the corner video store, 
and I’m gripped by a cherishing so / deep 
/ for my own blowing hair, chapped face, 
and unbuttoned coat that I’m / speech-
less: / I am living. I remember you.”
“Unearth [The Flowers]” by Thea 
Matthews
“Unearth [The Flowers]” is a book for 
today’s moment of collective outrage and 
action. Matthews, a Black Indigenous 
Mexican poet, does not shy away from the 
grief and anger born from colonization, 
militarism and patriarchy. This is not an 
easy read — the violence she describes 

left a sickening feeling in my stomach. But 
the poems are, at their roots, vignettes of 
survival and resilience. How does one 
heal when the injuring is ongoing? How 
does one reclaim their body, their life? 
With each poem named after a flower, 

Matthews shows how people can bloom 
even through the darkest moments, 

how we will always plant our roots and 
reach towards the sun: “My roots now 
/ strengthened my bones in formation / 
I emerge slowly uprising in the night. I 
rise / in the glimmer of untamable waters 
/ I live.”

Content warning: Character death, vio-
lence, spoilers for “The Walking Dead” 
THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON AMC 
television series “The Walking Dead” 
(Robert Kirkman) was once one of the 
most highly rated television series on 
air. “The Walking Dead” follows zom-
bie apocalypse survivors Rick Grimes 
(Andrew Lincoln, “Penguin Bloom”), 
Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan, “Invinci-
ble”), Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun, “Minari”) 
and an ensemble of a few dozen other 
characters as they clash with the brain-
eating monsters and other survivors alike. 
Despite its acclaim, the show has some-
what faded from the public eye in recent 

years. The adventures of protagonist Rick 
Grimes and company inevitably become 
dull as similar plot threads are repeated 
and a large portion of its original cast 
is killed off. Still, “The Walking Dead” 
remains a guilty pleasure of mine, regard-
less of this decline in quality. Watching 
the world end for Rick Grimes, though 
often a complicated viewing relationship, 
has taught me how to prevent my own 
from ending. 
It all started one blistering summer 
afternoon some four or five years ago. In 
search of an escape and a quick thrill, my 
mother and I embarked on our first epi-
sode of the acclaimed series, not know-
ing what lay ahead of us. One episode 
was enough to have us wrapped around 
Grimes’s finger. A weekly routine became 
a nightly binge which became an insatia-

ble obsession. 
We turned into Walkers ourselves, des-
perate to feast on any Walking Dead con-
tent we could get our hands on. Thanks 
to my mother’s Netflix subscription and 
the DVD section of my hometown’s pub-
lic library, this hunger engulfed our sum-
mer with an intensity akin to infatuation. 
Now, years later, I am both proud and 
embarrassed to say that I have watched 10 
seasons of “The Walking Dead,” six sea-
sons of the spinoff-prequel series, “Fear 
the Walking Dead” and (unfortunately) 
one season of “The Walking Dead: World 
Beyond.”
As time went on, the magic of the first 
five or six seasons wore off, and watching 
“The Walking Dead” became increasing-
ly daunting. I was continually force-fed 
unnecessary character deaths and con-

trived storylines. There have been mar-
ginal improvements in recent seasons, but 
too many aspects of the show are twisted 
unrecognizably from their origins; all 
but two original cast members have been 
killed off or left the show. “The Walking 
Dead” became the television embodiment 
of the Ship of Theseus. I was no longer 
watching the same show I fell in love with.
As “The Walking Dead” has experi-
enced somewhat of an apocalypse of its 
own, the COVID-19 pandemic raged on 
and created a world that was hauntingly 
similar to the desolate landscape depict-
ed in the show. At its best, “The Walk-
ing Dead” underlined the importance of 
found family and connection through 
adversity. Like Rick Grimes and his group 
of survivors, the only way I could weather 
this apocalypse was with the aid of fam-

ily. 
My mother and I watched every single 
episode of the nearly 200-episode series 
together; we cried together, we screamed 
in terror together, we expressed our 
disappointment together. When a gut-
punching cliffhanger left us in awe, we 
would revel in it. When a string of bad 
episodes left a sour taste we could always 
turn to each other to complain. Sharing 
the strenuous viewing experience made 
it more than bearable, even when “The 
Walking Dead” was at its worst. Watch-
ing the show with my family during the 
pandemic was one of the only things that 
kept me sane; the escapism of a fictional 
apocalypse helped me cope with the real-
ity of the global pandemic. 

Poetry to get you through the 2020s (and your 20s)

Life lessons from Rick Grimes and his zombie apocalypse

Our current apocalypse 
can’t be escaped in fiction

THE APOCALYPSE OF the past 
two years was marked in my life, not 
just by the COVID-19 pandemic, but 
by the subjects of the books I read. 
I began reading more consistently 
during this time and found myself 
deep in a genre of existential stories 
that, whether or not I realized it at 
the time, added still more apocalyp-
tic material to my darkening view 
of the world. After Kurt Vonnegut’s 
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” the injustice 
of war was stamped into my brain 
on top of the rising COVID-19 cases. 
After Michael Cunningham’s “The 
Hours,” it was sickness and sadness 
and the fact that the human condition 
had begun to appear fractured. These 
and other novels left me unsettled by 
the passage of time for longer than 
I’d care to admit. I loved books like 
these, anxious and pessimistic as they 
made me. They altered my thinking. 
I felt changed by the authors’ use of 
language, which was powerful and 
mesmerizing. They were beautifully 
written, and they meant something. 
There was no question for me that 
they were worth my time.
Yet as the pandemic dragged on in 
the real world, and the insurmount-
able worldly problems and existential-
ism piled up in the fiction I consumed, 
I began to long for an escape. I loved 
these books, but I needed a break 
from them. I wanted to be happy 
while reading, not because I liked the 
writing or because of Vonnegut’s dry, 
satirical humor, but because the sto-
ries themselves were happy. I wanted 
a book that was cozy and exciting. 
I wanted fluff. I wanted romance. I 
wanted characters to root for who got 
what they wanted in clear-cut ways 
that I didn’t need to struggle to wrap 
my mind around.
So, I set out to find a cute, fluffy 
romance novel. It couldn’t be too hard, 

I thought. Not a big romance reader 
myself, I turned to the BookTubers 
I watched, and they almost unani-
mously recommended Talia Hibbert’s 
“Get a Life, Chloe Brown.” I checked 
it out from the library with perhaps 
unattainably high hopes.
I liked “Chloe Brown” well enough, 
but it wasn’t everything I had dreamed 
it would be. I tried to be invested in the 
story, to care whether the characters 
ended up together, but the reality 
was that I wasn’t. I couldn’t shake the 
feeling that the story didn’t matter. I 
doubted it would deeply affect me in 
any way. I didn’t want this to be true. 
I certainly didn’t want to be someone 
who couldn’t enjoy romance novels 
because they weren’t heavy and dense 
and “serious.” I desperately wanted to 
care about Chloe and her love interest, 
Red. I tried to fend off my ambiva-
lence to the story, but in the end, it 
was impossible. I looked for other 
romance novels, but none appealed 
to me much more. I followed this fail-
ure with a string of thrillers — a genre 
I once loved — but the ones I chose, 
highly recommended as they were, 
felt generic; they felt like nothing spe-
cial and I stopped reading most after 
a few chapters. I didn’t want to read 
another heavy book yet. I still wanted 
something fun, but for one reason 
or another, I didn’t enjoy the books I 
thought would fit this description.
While deciding to write this for 
The Michigan Daily, I realized that 
I needed to think of a book that had 
saved me. A book that had felt both 
meaningful and worthwhile and 
been truly energizing to read — fun 
in a non-depressing way. I knew that 
I must have read such a book during 
this time, and finding it was the logi-
cal conclusion to this piece. Racking 
my brain, thinking of every piece of 
fiction I read in the last two years, I 
could not find anything that fit the bill. 

Design by Reid Graham

 BRENNA GOSS
 Daily Arts Writer

ERIN EVANS
Daily Arts Writer

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By Judy Hughes
©2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/23/22

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

02/23/22

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, February 23, 2022

ACROSS
1 Pierre’s st.
5 Retro ski area 
sight
9 Sounding 
amazed
14 Dance at Jewish 
weddings
15 Slippery
16 Not exactly a 
company person
17 Like a GI doing 
dishes
18 It starts the pot
19 Former 
Portuguese 
territory in China
20 Train vigorously
23 Obscure
24 Worldwide 
cultural org.
27 Part of a play
29 Like wee bairns
30 Street-paving 
goop
31 Show eager 
anticipation
35 Citrus drinks
37 Brazil __
38 Cookies-and-
cream ingredient
39 Search 
everywhere
44 Timeworn
45 Paddle relative
46 Honor society 
starter
47 Subject of the 
Book of Proverbs
49 Neither early nor 
late
54 Work really hard 
for victory ... and 
a hint to the start 
of 20-, 31- and 
39-Across
58 Classic mother-
and-son statue
60 Pub projectile
61 Yellowish green
62 Primp
63 Geometry 
product
64 Techie, say
65 Cline of country
66 Sail support
67 “Get lost!”

DOWN
1 Exhibited, as a 
home for sale

2 Hawaiian singing 
legend
3 Alan of “Argo”
4 Honor society 
ender
5 Town where 
the New Jersey 
(now Brooklyn) 
Nets played 
home games for 
their first year
6 Twisted
7 The “A” in SATB
8 Bar shelf lineup
9 Annual fact book
10 Act bonkers
11 Family tree 
members
12 North __
13 Play-for-pay
21 Apple desktop
22 Sings without 
lyrics
25 Common 
superhero garb
26 Estimate 
qualifier
28 Printer supply
29 Prep
31 Bare bones 
musical notation
32 Loyal end?
33 Heart

34 Garden tool
35 Take __: 
acknowledge 
applause
36 Business with a 
slicer
40 More than 
needed
41 Soccer great 
Mia
42 Call to from a 
distance
43 Clue

48 Sources of high 
school jitters
50 Anklebone
51 “If only”
52 Old copy 
machine
53 Four before mayo
55 Dutch cheese
56 __ avis
57 Mining targets
58 Very softly, in 
music
59 Sr.’s nest egg

SUDOKU

WHISPER

“Has everything 
worked out 
yet?”

“Froyo is totally 
out for 2021 
AF!!”

WHISPER

By George Jasper
©2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/16/22

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

02/16/22

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, February 16, 2022

ACROSS
1 Bare-bones
6 Out of concern 
that
10 Distance runner’s 
concern
14 Early Greek 
public space
15 Excessively: Pref.
16 Aerosol target
17 Mall map 
clarification
19 Half a patio pair
20 Cuban missile 
crisis strategy
22 Uncertainties
25 Even the queen, 
in chess
26 Beat in a hot dog 
contest
27 Like nobility
29 Slow movement
31 Web app for the 
latest
33 What 15 U.S. 
presidents 
formerly were, 
briefly
36 Son of 
Chingachgook, in 
a Cooper novel
37 Be in the red
38 Hustle
40 Shaggy pack 
animal
41 Pre-wedding 
show
43 Frequents dive 
bars, say
45 Pretentious type
46 Key participant
49 NBA tiebreakers
50 Water holder
51 Salad dressing 
brand ... and 
what each set of 
circles reveals
55 Opposed to, in 
dialect
56 Start of a proverb 
for which Ben 
Franklin is 
credited
60 It’s about a foot
61 “Star Trek: 
T.N.G.” counselor
62 Do away with
63 Online craft shop
64 Newcastle’s river
65 Summer Triangle 
star

DOWN
1 __ window
2 Before now

3 Thing of little 
worth
4 Turkey 
neighbor
5 Whitman’s 
Sampler 
choices
6 “Freaky Friday” 
actress Lindsay
7 First name in 
daredevilry
8 Saharan
9 Shakes
10 One may be 
sweet
11 Love to death
12 __ line
13 Cereal killer
18 Artfully escape
21 Listening device
22 Company’s tech 
guru
23 “Shrek” 
princess
24 Keep in the 
supply room
28 NYC airport on 
Flushing Bay
29 Civil rights 
legend John
30 Blown away
32 What do you 
expect?
33 Put out
34 __ New Guinea

35 Perfect thing that’s 
not beneficial
38 Like idiomatic 
skeletons
39 Tom, Dick and 
Harry
41 TV host/
comedian 
with 23 Emmy 
nominations
42 In a suitable 
manner
43 New South 
Wales capital

44 Jeans brand
46 Part of a process
47 __-year
48 “So long, amigo”
49 Skateboard 
move
52 Fluctuate
53 “East of Eden” 
twin
54 Bygone days
57 Stop legally
58 Austin-to-
Houston dir.
59 Star of the ball

CONNOR JORDAN
 Daily Arts Contributor

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Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Design by Jennie Vang

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