How does one measure time spent in the pandemic? Days? Weeks? Years? Or is it something else? Number of deaths? Number of survivals? Timeless lapses spent thinking about loved ones, lost opportunities, a frighteningly changing world?

COVID19 HAIKU explores the concept of time in a disaster by breaking the pandemic down over its first year and several months using the short poetic form. By using epistolary pieces, many traditional haiku, the collection takes the momentum of large history and distills it into short poetic dispatches. The collection opens in January 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, and goes through May 2021 with the beginning of mass vaccinations for the United States. The book looks at COVID, the turmoil of Trump’s final year in office, and the George Floyd protests. The poems move from inner thoughts, and reflections on nature, to commentary on American society during a year of uncertainty, violence, and survival.

Wesley R. Bishop is a historian, editor, and poet. He is the founding and managing editor of North Meridian Press.

"Bishop's mixed media, form-shifting Covid-19 poetry transmits a glimmer of breaking. Breaking that is within the ordinariness of the day-to-day to uncover how strange it is to live in America. So many of us sat with the same reflections in our respective locations, socially and geographically, to find just how betrayed we felt, far before any pandemic changed our routines. Bishop's poems create a self-reflexive exercise allowing us to sit with where we've been and how it opened us to what we could become."

-Dr. Mauve Perle Tahat, Revisions Podcast