If God Is a Virus

“Yasmin, a medical doctor who investigated outbreaks for the Epidemic Intelligence Service from the CDC and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, brings considerable experience and a poet’s vision and sense to her depiction of Ebola’s spread through Liberia. To read this work during the coronavirus pandemic is to recognize Yasmin’s prescience, and her ability to unpack how disease intersects with prejudice, race, myth, and poverty.” —The Millions If God is a Virus proves that poetry and public health together make and contain medical language, which makes the language of an epidemic more visible, more veracious. What breaks through is a voice of interiority telling us what’s not told about our bodies and what it means to function.—Janice Sapigao, poet laureate, Santa Clara County, author of like a solid to a shadow

In a time of heartbreak and devastation due to the world pandemic, Seema Yasmin’s brilliant If God Is a Virus takes a timely and critical look at disease and its sociopolitical contexts, including multi various forms of domination and hubris: colonization, White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism. This is a necessary book for our times. Read it and be changed. —Cathy Linh Che, author of Split, executive director Kundiman

Seema Yasmin’s fantastic hybrid poetry collection overthrows the dry mindlessness of scientific halls, their power points and false Gods in the face of racism and global domination. God is a virus, and she teaches us to see through data while teaching us to love.—Fady Joudah, author of Tethered to Stars

One always wants a poem to have such high stakes, wants a book to feel inevitable, that it couldn’t have been written and that no one else but the poet could have written it, so unique to an individual experience it is. Well, this is such a book. And only Seema Yasmin could have written it.—Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra

In her hands, a sole headline in Scientific American becomes a poem, as does the Hippocratic oath, the Broca’s region. Every journalist should read this book, every doctor, every patient. Gird your heart, though, she’s on a mission to break it with her tongue. —Lulu Miller, co-host of Radiolab and author of Why Fish Don’t Exist

Dr. Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, professor, medical doctor, and author of three books, including Muslim Women Are Everything. She teaches science journalism and global health storytelling at Stanford University and is the director of the Stanford Health Communications Initiative.

Her poetry has appeared in Foundry, The Literary Review, Ruminate, and Bateau, and in the anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: Halal If You Hear Me. If God Is A Virus is her first book-length collection of poems.