Ashna Ali's poetic memoir The Relativity of Living Well documents the experience of surviving infection with COVID-19 the period of quarantine between March and July 2020 as a queer immigrant of color public school teacher in New York City. These poems bear witness, holler rallying cries, and interrogate the roles, capacities, and needs of the individual within larger social fabrics afflicted by both pandemic and by imperialist capitalist logics of exploitation. These are poems of critique, of grief, and of the darkly absurd quotidian we have normalized in the face of structural failure.
