This book was conceived in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. The medieval book from which it takes its name—Boccacio's Decameron—was a prompt and a point of departure; perhaps we could keep each other company in writing, even as we were all confined to our separate places of quarantine. This collection contains poems and fragments, reflections, narratives and images produced between March 18 and April 10, 2020. It is a cross-section of a moment in time, and in the time that has elapsed since submissions closed, the world has become yet more complex. While the uprising sparked by the death of George Floyd in May was yet to come, many pieces in this collection attend to the underlying structural inequalities that impacted populations during COVID-19. Together, these pieces convey a breadth of human responses to extraordinary circumstances, from loneliness to fantasy, anxiety to mortality, and from hope to silence.
Decameron Contributors:
Justin Allen
Judy Annear
Adam Brody
Maurice Decal
Alexandra Delano
Caroline Dionne
Thom Donovan
Karin Ferrari
Jonathan Gray
Sarah Firth
Daniel Green
Aurelia Guo
Victoria Hattam
Athena Kokoronis
Mark Larrimore
Chantal Meng
Sara Morawetz
Justin Paton
Michael Pettinger
Dominic Pettman
Cheon Pyo Lee
Lovell Smajstrla
A.W. Strouse
McKenzie Wark
Izzy Wu
Editor:
Macushla Robinson
Production:
Ben Van Buren, Yonkers International Press
2020