Accardi’s poems capture the cultural moment and illuminate the need for a new set of rules for our assumptions that a mutual love between human beings is always at our fingertips. The notion that all will be well is simply a perfunctory state of mind. Love and joy cannot always save us, she writes in Broken Pieces: “The empirical /wish of a stupid requirement for happiness.” (3) But love is, nevertheless, a necessity: “Love is not a currency, neither is it an assignment./ … How can you not know/how to break through and touch me? Isn’t love/like drinking water for thirst …” (14)

Quarantine Highway is Accardi’s attempt to map where her mind traveled during a period of uncertainty and isolation. By using the time to examine how memories and other writers impacted her, she’s able to transcribe a period of time that will be under examination for years to come, while also encapsulating exactly the person she is in this specific time and place. It’s a manifesto of her survival and her identity in response to the pandemic, and its existence will demonstrate how to be led back to a place of safety.

The awe-inspiring imagery and emotional depiction that Accardi so talentedly presents engages the reader beyond merely the words on the page and instead presents a world seldom considered; the thoughts and workings of the inner mind that are often in a world of their own;

And, I am ashes, turning over to extinguish

the inevitable. My civility, apparent, having

a total hold on reality, shaken to ice once again.

Such imagery engenders a sense of unique introspection that transcends this collection and highlights the bold tenacity of Accardi and her whimsical words. As a whole Quarantine Highway is not a collection that is centred on the pandemic but a collection that speaks to the isolation, fragility and contrasting darkness and light that exists within all of us. This collection is one that should be savoured on dark nights of the soul where one seeks to truly understand their mind. This collection wrestles with the intimate and the banal and makes the reader all the better for ruminating in its genius.

Concerns about the future and the wish to survive mingle in Accardi’s poems, creating fresh ideas that reveal a wish for healing despite sufferings, disappointments, contradictions and unsettling scenarios. Her poetry is absorbing and reveals a persistent exploration into existence and the meaning of being human.