Left: Front Cover: If God Is A Virus: Poems by Seema Yasmin
Photo Credit: Haymarket Books
Right: Photo of Seema Yasmin by Lucas Passmore published on her Official Website

My Poetry Corner April 2026 features the poem “Disease Is Not the Only Thing That Spreads” from the first poetry collection If God Is a Virus (Haymarket Books, 2021) by Seema Yasmin, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, professor, and author. Inspiration for this book came from her reporting as a doctor and journalist on the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and its aftermath. The poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, role of the aid industrial complex during health crises, and the way medical myths and rumors can travel faster than microbes. By chance, the book was released during the coronavirus global pandemic.

Yasmin writes in the seven-verse poem “We Are Watching” (p. 40):

Brown deaths six (thousand) / Miles away matter less // Or not at all if that segment / Airs before commercial break // We regret to inform you // Your scheduled programming / Has been interrupted

Born in Warwickshire, England, Yasmin was raised in East London by immigrant Muslim parents of Indian and Burmese ancestry. She studied biochemistry at Queen Mary University of London where she graduated in 2005 and earned her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree at the University of Cambridge. Permission to study medicine did not come easy for a girlchild born into a conservative religious Muslim family. She shares her frustration and anger in the poem “lady doctor” (stanzas 2 & 3, pp. 12-13):

I was vexed slammed the kitchen door twelve-year-old girl with a penchant for electrons and using the ice cube tray to freeze different molarities of saline to find the lowest freezing point not to mince garlic green chilies into frozen cubes for speedy curry making to feed hungry doctor husband one day

lady doctor you say to the receptionist and then how can there be none? it is a women’s health clinic how can there be none? none? in all the NHS there is none? and the tug in your uterus is so deep you say a man cannot go that deep cannot go so deep as a woman you say as I cringe behind you and the woman whose mother let her be a receptionist shrugs

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