Keeping Room · Ann E. Wallace
Ann Wallace’s embodied, ecopoetic collection Keeping Room explores the spaces we keep and are kept, and what we must make room for. The narrator goes from a “girl searching alone and in silence for toads,” to a college student experiencing a cancer diagnosis during “nature’s near-neon boast,” to a mother navigating Long COVID alongside her daughter. In a bittersweet twist, her daughter being unwell slows, for a time, “the steady march // away from childhood,” and the “ever cycling // further from the song and skip.” A series of nightmare poems is braided with the waking nightmare of pandemic and with verses on cooking, where outcomes are measured into existence, and imperfections smoothed with utensils, imagination, and grit. Wallace’s book closes as generously as it was composed, with “an ear bent toward hope.”
— Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Singing from the Deep End
ISBN 978-1-949279-63-4
102 Pages
$20.00
read an excerpt
The Keeping Room
There comes a time when the phones
are powered down, the shutters pulled tight.
Within the keeping room, we worry.
We wait.
When life is reduced to the smallest
motions, to the thrumming pain of leaving,
unheard, invisible to all but those of us
here gathered, we know but cannot bear
to concede, hope’s time has passed.
Emergency Room Visits in March 2020
When they turned the pediatric emergency room
into a COVID triage area in the early days,
decals of monkeys with curling tails,
loping elephants, spotted giraffes grazed
the walls. The doctor who took my vitals
was tired, hadn’t seen his kids in two weeks.
The hospital prepared to admit me, then sent
me home after two rounds of bloodwork and testing.
They needed the bed. Three days later, I returned
on my 50th birthday, barely conscious,
bypassed the children’s unit, and was wheeled inside
where the serious cases were handled.
The aide hesitated to help me onto the bed,
offered a gloved hand only after I pleaded,
and my new doctor would not step inside
my curtain. He poked his masked face
through the gap in the fabric to ask
my cell number. He wrote it on a Post-it
and backed away like from a caged tiger.
I never received his call.
Paper Trails
Pages float through the night sky
on the New Jersey Turnpike,
fluttering in the glow of headlights
reflecting off the glistening roadbed.
Words aloft, drift on the air.
The unknown composer travels
away, away, leaving a trail
of missives in their silent wake.
Tomorrow, people will open
front doors to damp sheets
of paper plastered on steps,
caught in high branches, peeking
from flower beds. Who will pause
to claim these lines launched
into the wind – stray remains
of an unfinished story?
about the author
Ann E. Wallace, PhD is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey. As a long-time survivor of ovarian cancer, a woman with multiple sclerosis, and one of the nation’s first Long Covid patients, she has lived and ritten through illness for more than thirty years. Pain, disability, and disease – as well as hope and resilience – have nspired and informed her work as a poet, memoirist, patient advocate, and scholar. Wallace’s previous poetry collections include Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul (Kelsay Books) and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag). Her work is included in The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press), The Big Brutal Act Anthology (Harbor Anthologies), and Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching through Emergencies (Peter Lang), and her essays have appeared in Huffington Post, USA Today, WSQ, and elsewhere.
Copyright © 2026 Ann E. Wallace
Book design by d’Entremont
Cover photograph used with permission.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
ISBN 978-1-949279-63-4
Author photo by Reena Rose Sibayan
