Flare, Corona
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
Against a constellation of solar weather events and an ominously encroaching pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of perseverance amid health crises and uncertain futures.
Flare, Corona is radiant, blazing a path to a world where we can brilliantly and stubbornly survive.
could be so fun?
In Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey uses self-portraits as insights into the improbable, the miraculous while she melds the personal with the political to tell a story of a world and body in crises. Flare, Corona is a personal account, set against a backdrop of eclipses and solar weather phenomenon, of a precarious journey through multiple health crises climaxing in a global pandemic. It’s also a real-life fairy tale of apocalypse, supervillains, cherry trees, and foxes. Gailey’s incandescent writing illuminates the power of humor, hope, and an insistence on survival in a perilous and painfully beautiful world.
Pricing and Availability
Flare, Corona (BOA Editions, 2023) is a softcover book with a list price of $17; it is available from the following locations:
- From Amazon.com.
- From Barnes & Noble.
- Direct from BOA Editions.
An eGalley version of Flare, Corona is available for potential reviewers, on request.
Awards and Honors
Praise for Flare, Corona
Everything really is connected is what I kept thinking as I read Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona. In it, the ecological crisis we face is felt in the marrow of the body, and ‘chronic illness’ becomes a phrase to characterize not only a human condition but our global one.
Yet Hall Gailey faces personal and societal illness with characteristic deep feeling and humor, and I was struck by the search for hope and optimism undergirding these inviting, image-rich poems:‘Look to the future—perhaps that glow you see isn’t fire, but sunrise.’
—Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are
Who knew the apocalypse could be so fun? Jeannine Hall Gailey, that’s who. Our trenchant speaker, who ‘wrote a nuclear winter poem when I was seven,’ now in mid-life finds herself smack dab in the eye of a perfect storm: a mistaken terminal cancer diagnosis resolves itself into an MS diagnosis accessorized with a corona virus crown. Yet these poems are deeply life-affirming, filled with foxes and fairy tales and fig trees. Flare, Corona is a surprising, skilled, and big-hearted book.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W.Norton) and Poet Laureate of Mississippi
We all have bodies that we know will fail on us, and we live in a world we know is riven by troubles. But how few of us really reckon with the body’s—and the body politic’s—failures until disaster strikes—for us or for a loved one. Flare, Corona is full of these dark facts, as Jeannine Hall Gailey grapples with her own illness and with an America, maybe a world, that seems to be falling apart. Yet in poem after full, fast, lush poem, Gailey keeps turning disaster into light, not at all to falsify the very real darkness, but to turn ethical, engaged attention to what is. This book is full of a life insisting on its own richness, carried out in spite of what can’t be avoided.”
—Daisy Fried, author of The Year the City Emptied
The milieu of Flare, Corona, is at once literal and metaphorical: what blooms in the water and soil of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, ultimately blooms in the bodies of those who grew up there. This collection effortlessly toggles between what feels endangered in the macro-political scale of contemporary American society, and in the micro-medical reality of our speaker: “My first flare came on the week of the solar eclipse / when the shadow fell cold over us, and the birds stopped singing.” What’s astonishing about this collection is how the poet showcases her trademark dark humor and vivid hyperbole—all the while pulling the reader in close to consider, frankly and with earned insight, the experience of chronic illness. Crafty uses of parallel structure and self-portraiture elevate personal narratives into poems that will outlive any apocalypse. This is an immersive, terrific read. “
—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode
Reviews and Features
In 2020, amidst devastating wildfires and insurrections and a pandemic, we all seemed to collectively agree that we were living through the end of the world (or to quote an internet meme and the title of one of these poems, ‘This Is the Darkest Timeline’). But isn’t someone’s world always ending somewhere? The poems in Flare, Corona hinge on a paradox: ‘This is not the end, just an ending’…Flare, Corona is a life-affirming exploration of the small endings that occur every day, set against the backdrop of our world ending…In the end, our own or the world’s, all we have are moments where we felt something. It’s all over, and it’s never over.”
—Excerpted from Carrie Lee South’s review in Colorado Review
Throughout its exploration of pandemic, post-life, present life, and perseverance, Flare, Corona ultimately points to the strength that humanity still has in the face of the sorrow and hysteria the world heaves our way, even if that strength isn’t always prevalent. Through upfront honesty and the undeniable emotional threads that balance the language, Gailey crafts a collection that prompts us to reflect on our own responses—physical, emotional, and otherwise—to an ever-changing world.”
—Excerpted from JP Legarte’s review in f(r)iction
Edginess, unsettlement, a sense of foreboding: what weather can come to bear and a skillful poet with some thoughts
on mortality to share. Jeannine Hall Gailey’s ability to turn it up—or down, thankfully—is what makes reading her work in Flare, Corona a bit like riding out a November gale on a paddleboard.
—Excerpted from Matt Sutherland’s review in Foreword Reviews
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize, Field Guide to the End of the World, and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner.
