Love Too Can Spread: Poetry From the Midst of a Pandemic

So beautifully captures the complexity, struggle, humour and hope found in this last year. Can’t wait for the next one!

A beautiful book that captures the unique blend of emotions that we’ve experienced during the pandemic. The book was both thought provoking and laughter inducing. I look forward to rereading it many times and buying copies as gifts for my friends and family.

Love Too Can Spread is a wonderful collection of thoughtful poems and reflections on how our lives changed during the pandemic. Some of them offer insight into Satok's personal experience and others assume the point of view of others, young and old, offering stories and poems that will be relatable to everyone. Personally, I'm just starting to process what an enormous shift we have experienced over the past 2 years and are still reckoning with and adapting to. I am glad to have Love Too Can Spread as a companion in my process of integration and am grateful for the author's efforts to capture such a momentous time in history in thoughtful prose and clever storytelling.

In this slim volume that moves deftly between poetry and prose, Ari Satok lends his generous, hilarious, and unflinchingly honest voice to the greatest historical event of our generation so far. His poems capture the mundanities of life under lockdown, often in creative and surprising ways: one poem imagines what mask-wearing fictional characters would have to say about a masked-up world. They also capture the rollercoaster of quarantine: the job losses incurred, the exhaustion of loneliness, the magic felt after embracing the opportunity to slow down. Satok takes care to be more openly reflective in this book than his previous ones, switching to prose to narrate his own experience of the pandemic, turning this book of poems into a memoir, an archive, a time capsule. Reading through is a way to relive the particularities of the pandemic, but it is also a reminder of its greatest lessons: seizing hope, practising gratitude, and giving as much kindness as possible — to others and ourselves. This book is a gift to read through and would make an excellent gift to your loved ones upon reuniting with them.

Ari Satok's book is full of the healing we all need as we emerge from this pandemic. He captures the past year+ of COVID with a whole lot of humor and care. His writing is so heartfelt and his reflections are deep. I found myself smiling, laughing, and on the verge of tears while reading. You can tell this is someone who has been observing the world with a keen eye this past year, witnessing the suffering, the heroism, the big picture and the mundane moments that our lives have been comprised of. I could not recommend more highly. I already purchased one of these for some dear family member who caught COVID, and they're planning to buy 20 for all of their friends. Thank you, Ari!